Administration Announces Proposed Appointments For MSHA and OSM

On July 6, 2009, the Administration announced that it intended to nominate Joe Main as the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health, and Joe Pizarchik as the Director of the Office of Surface Mining in the U.S. Department of Interior. 

 

According to the Administration’s pres release, Joe Main worked in various capacities for the UMWA for nearly thirty years, and most recently has been a self-employed mine safety consultant.  Pizarchik has been Director of the Bureau of Mining and Reclamation in Pennsylvania’s DEP since 2002. He is a lawyer who worked with the Pennsylvania mining program for eleven years prior to becoming Director of the Bureau of Mining and Reclamation in 2002. His nomination was not favored by anti-mining groups, which had hoped for the nomination of either Joe Childers of Kentucky or Pat McGinley, a professor at West Virginia University. 

This article was authored by Robert G. McLusky, Jackson Kelly PLLC. For more information on the author see here.