The Snapchat filter, which targets McGinty for her countless trips through the revolving door for personal profit, will be available to Snapchat users who are at the event site.
The Snapchat campaign falls on the same day that the Philadelphia Inquirer outlined McGinty’s curious timeline from the public to private sector, and how she used her government relationships to pave the way for a lucrative private sector career.
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GOP turns McGinty victory into attack
The Philadelphia Inquirer
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In ads, mailers, and campaign stops, Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) and his allies contend that McGinty turned government posts and taxpayer aid into six-figure positions with environmental and energy companies, including one that was a major shareholder in Gamesa.
That criticism forms the backbone of a Republican offensive as the Senate race enters its final two months.
"Special deals, special interests. Katie McGinty: getting ahead at our expense," says the latest TV ad from Freedom Partners, a Super PAC aligned with the conservative Koch brothers. The group has bought $7 million worth of airtime to oppose the Democrat.
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Now residents of Wayne, McGinty, 53, and her husband, Karl Hausker, an environmental consultant and former Environmental Protection Agency official, have a net worth in the millions – possibly more than Toomey, who had a career as a Wall Street trader in the 1980s and early ’90s, according to their financial disclosure records.
Pennsylvania law bars public officials from lobbying on issues they handled for one year after leaving office. There is no indication that McGinty crossed that line.
But Barry Kauffman, executive director of the good-government group Common Cause Pennsylvania, said it’s fair to scrutinize a public official who joins an industry that he or she once regulated.
"The public has a right to be concerned about what did a public official do in their last weeks, days, months of public service, to open the doors to their new, probably more lucrative, jobs," Kauffman said, adding that he did not know enough about McGinty’s work to comment on her situation.
Government officials often ride their knowledge, connections, and clout into the private sector.
McGinty’s move in that direction didn’t get much attention until she began running for Senate.
She was best known as a top environmental aide in the Clinton administration when Gov. Ed Rendell named her secretary of environmental protection.
Soon after taking the post in 2003, she pitched Gamesa’s chief executive on Pennsylvania.
The next year, after heavy lobbying from Rendell and McGinty and pledges of state support, Gamesa announced that it would establish a U.S. headquarters in Center City and open a manufacturing site for its turbines. It brought a $40 million investment, and would later add a $34 million manufacturing facility in Fairless Hills. Pennsylvania kicked in nearly $20 million in grants, job training, tax credits, and loans.
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Among others, Rendell and McGinty also drew investments from Iberdrola, a Spanish wind-energy giant that opened an office in Radnor.
McGinty, as chair of the Pennsylvania Energy Development Authority, helped approve millions of dollars of state aid for a wide range of new green energy projects.
In 2008, with Iberdrola up and running in Pennsylvania, she also urged Rendell to put in a good word with New York Gov. David Paterson as the company pushed to acquire a utility with operations in the Empire State.
Later that year, she left the DEP, and three months later she joined the board of directors at NRG Energy, a Princeton-based energy company. From 2008 to 2013 she made $1.1 million in cash and stocks from NRG, SEC filings show. That board met at least five times a year, her campaign said.
In 2009, roughly a year after leaving the DEP, McGinty also joined Iberdrola’s U.S. affiliate as a board member, paid $100,000 a year. The panel met at least 11 times a year, her campaign said.
In addition, starting in 2009 she was an operating partner at Element Partners, a private equity fund that focused on the environmental sector, and then left to become a vice president at Weston Solutions, a West Chester-based environmental cleanup firm.
She remained on Iberdrola’s board as she launched her first run for public office, unsuccessfully seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in 2014. She stayed on the Iberdrola board until Jan. 18, 2015, two days before Wolf took office and she became his chief of staff, returning to government work.
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Republicans now insinuate that McGinty’s push to bring Gamesa to Pennsylvania and aid for other green energy projects paved the way for her private work, particularly her board slot with Iberdrola.
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Initially, the Gamesa investments were a hit.
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But the Pennsylvania sites eventually sputtered.
Layoffs arrived in 2009 and 2012, and in 2014 Gamesa announced it was closing its Western Pennsylvania plant. Work at the Bucks County facility has also wound down.
The cuts arrived as Gamesa slashed thousands of jobs worldwide. In the U.S., wind energy fell on hard times as a federal tax credit lapsed, and fossil fuels got cheaper.
As the Gamesa factories went dark, McGinty, seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in 2014, said "this rips a big piece of my heart out…These were jobs with good salaries and good benefits." And she blasted then-Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, for opposing federal tax credits for wind energy.
At the time, she was still on Iberdrola’s board of directors.
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