Pa. governor-elect nominates 2

Associated Press

HARRISBURG

The top criminal investigator in the state attorney general’s office would lead the Pennsylvania State Police and a county jail warden would head the state prison system if Gov.-elect Tom Corbett wins approval for a pair of Cabinet nominations he unveiled Friday.

The state Senate must confirm the nominations of Frank Noonan and John Wetzel. Last week, Corbett tapped coal-company executive Alan Walker to serve as his secretary of the Department of Community and Economic Development.

Noonan, a retired FBI agent, has worked under Corbett for six years and in the attorney general’s office since 1998. He is the office’s chief of criminal investigations.

The 64-year-old Noonan would break a chain of six state police commissioners who rose through the agency’s ranks to lead a police force that is as one of the nation’s largest.

With about 6,000 troopers and civilian employees, the agency has a budget this year of $876 million. It patrols state highways and provides primary police protection for more than a quarter of Pennsylvanians as well as lab services, helicopters and bomb squad expertise to local police departments.

Noonan manages a staff of nearly 300 investigative agents in the Bureau of Narcotics Investigation, the Bureau of Criminal Investigations and the Bureau of Investigative Services, Corbett said. Before 2009, he was the director of the agency’s northeast region office and spent 27 years with the FBI.

Noonan received a Bronze Star for his service with the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam, and last year received the Linda E. Richardson Commitment to Excellence Award, given by the Pennsylvania Narcotics Officers’ Association, Corbett said.

Wetzel has been the warden of the Franklin County Jail since 2002 and was appointed in 2007 by Gov. Ed Rendell to serve on the state Board of Pardons.

The 41-year-old Wetzel began his corrections career as a prison guard, and hails from a system — about 140 employees and a daily average of 330 inmates in 2009 — that is dwarfed by the task Corbett wants to assign him: managing one of the nation’s largest state prison systems.

If confirmed, Wetzel would oversee an expanding agency that also has shipped 2,000 prisoners out of state and placed about 600 more in county jails because of overcrowding as it waits for three new prisons to be built.

All told, the state’s 27 prisons hold more than 51,000 inmates. The agency employs over 16,000 employees and has a $1.9 billion budget.

State Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee for 25 years, said he does not know Wetzel but noted that Wetzel’s service on the pardons board should have given him experience with state issues.

Greenleaf, R-Montgomery, said he is keeping an open mind about Wetzel and looks forward to “talking to him, interviewing him, looking over his qualifications.”

Corrections secretaries over the last 35 years have come from the ranks of county jail wardens — Philadelphia and Allegheny County, among them — or from within the department.

Corbett, the state’s Republican attorney general, is working to assemble a Cabinet before he is sworn in as Pennsylvania’s 46th governor Jan. 18.