Shapiro taps longtime aides to top jobs in governor’s office

By MARC LEVY Associated Press

Gov.-elect Josh Shapiro is tapping longtime aides to take top positions in his office weeks before he is sworn in as Pennsylvania’s 48th governor, as he prepares to leave the attorney general’s office for a sprawling administration that runs the nation’s fifth-most populous state.

Shapiro said in a statement Tuesday that Uri Monson will be his top fiscal officer as budget secretary and Jennifer Selber will be his top lawyer as general counsel. Shapiro has also named his campaign manager, Dana Fritz, as his chief of staff atop a state government of roughly 80,000 employees that doles out more than $100 billion a year in state and federal money.

Shapiro, who is finishing his sixth year as state attorney general, will be sworn in Jan. 17.

Fritz, 32, goes back a decade with Shapiro, helping him campaign for Montgomery County commissioner in 2012 before she held senior positions in his three successful campaigns for state attorney general and governor. In between, she worked as a top deputy for communications under Shapiro in the attorney general’s office.

Selber, 52, is currently Shapiro’s executive deputy attorney general in charge of the office’s criminal division and has been by Shapiro’s side in announcing the office’s biggest cases.

Selber oversees 13 sections and more than 500 agents, lawyers and administrative staff in the criminal division, Shapiro’s campaign said. Before that, she was chief of the homicide unit in the district attorney’s office in Philadelphia, the nation’s sixth-most populous city.

The Office of General Counsel houses dozens of lawyers in about 30 state agencies and often goes to court on the state’s behalf, particularly when the attorney general’s office declines the task or delegates it.

Monson, 53, worked with Shapiro in Montgomery County as the chief financial officer of the state’s third-most populous county.

Before that, he ran the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, which the state created to oversee Philadelphia’s finances. Currently, he is deputy superintendent for operations at the $4.4 billion Philadelphia school district, the state’s largest, after six-plus years as the district’s chief financial officer.