Philadelphia Gas Works CEO got free trips to Phillies spring training, but didn’t disclose required details on state ethics form

Each spring, the CEO of the city-owned Philadelphia Gas Works jetted down to Clearwater, Florida, to attend the Philadelphia Phillies spring training on company time for at least four consecutive years.

The Phillies paid for the four-day trips taken by PGW CEO Seth Shapiro from 2022 to 2025, according to public filings. He estimated the value in 2025 alone was $2,500, after he was told to amend his filing by state officials to include the value of the hospitality gifts. That amended filing also listed a trip valued at $4,200 and paid for by the pipeline conglomerate Enbridge.

The value of a trip to the Phillies’ “Corporate Sponsorship Networking Event,” held annually in Clearwater, is unclear. But based on Shapiro’s amended 2025 filing, four years of trips, in addition to daylong Phillies events included in his filing, could be worth at least $10,000. The utility would not say whether Shapiro attended the Phillies spring training event in 2026.

PGW is a major advertiser on Phillies broadcasts and stadium signage and digital displays — spending that is approved by the CEO. The nonprofit gas utility spent more than $1 million to advertise with the Phillies from October 2022 to November 2024, public records show. As a municipally owned gas utility, Philadelphia’s 500,000 residential and commercial customers provide the vast majority of the utility’s revenue.

In addition to the Phillies spring training events, Shapiro was gifted hospitality from the health insurer Independence Blue Cross, the pipeline conglomerate Enbridge, the energy company 61 Commodities, the pipeline operator Williams Companies and Tioga LNG.

“Are you kidding me? Oh my god,” Penn professor Philip Nichols said. “If I were the CEO, I would not be taking these gifts.”

The baseball team’s largesse to Shapiro doesn’t sit well with Rev. Angela Brown-Vann, a PGW customer who has testified against rate increases at public hearings. PGW increased rates last December by 6.6%.

“This is a publicly owned utility. It’s not supposed to be operated as a private company,” said Brown-Vann, pastor of the Alleyne Memorial AME Zion Church in West Philadelphia, after being informed by WHYY News about the trips the Phillies provide to PGW’s chief executive.

Brown-Vann said most of those who attend her church qualify for the income-assistance program LIHEAP to pay their gas bills, though she does not. Still, she said her bills were so high last winter that she had to go on a payment plan.

“This seems like an ethical imbalance. To me, a corporate sponsorship event includes a benefit for both parties,” Brown-Vann said. “So what is the benefit for the people? [PGW] is a municipally owned utility, our rates are higher and the person we hire to run it is gallivanting all over the place? How does that benefit us? To what end is this hobnobbing?”

Shapiro did not respond to requests to discuss his free trips, and hung up on this reporter.

Neither PGW nor the Phillies would answer questions about what happens at the annual spring training event.

Instead, PGW issued the following statement.

“PGW’s current President & CEO, like past leadership, peer industry leadership, and peer Philadelphia business community leadership, attends executive events and conferences, to help to generate growth and revenue for the company and region, engage with business customers and industry executives, and acquire new business leads,” the statement said. “While PGW does not make a profit as a publicly owned utility, it does compete across industries and across state lines for customers, energy supply, and pipeline capacity to deliver safe, reliable, affordable service to the City.”

The Phillies’ spring training trips are just one example of hospitality gifts received by Shapiro that are subject to reporting under Pennsylvania’s ethics law.

But a review of public records by WHYY News found that Shapiro failed to provide critical, required information such as the actual value of the trips.

After WHYY News contacted the Pennsylvania State Ethics Commission, the commission sent a letter asking Shapiro to file an amended report for 2025. He did so for 2025, but not for the previous three years, according to Mary Fox, the commission’s executive director.

As the CEO of the nation’s largest municipally owned gas utility, Shapiro was paid $560,391.15 in salary and bonus in 2025, WHYY News learned after filing a Right-to-Know Act request.

Shapiro’s annual income, paid for by PGW’s revenue from gas bills to its ratepayers, is higher than any city employee.

For example, Mayor Cherelle Parker’s 2026 salary is $288,555, according to city records.

Brown-Vann said she’s incredulous that Shapiro takes advantage of free trips from Philadelphia’s MLB team.

The pastor suggested that as a benefit for PGW customers, “while he’s flying around, could we see an offset in the form of a rate drop?”

Philip Nichols, professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, was shocked when informed that the Phillies send PGW’s CEO on free trips to spring training.

“Are you kidding me? Oh my god,” he said. “If I were the CEO, I would not be taking these gifts.”

Nichols said the CEO of any public utility has “fiduciary duties to the general public.”

“And among those duties is a duty of loyalty that includes a duty not to put themselves in a position where there’s a conflict of interest,” he said.

Former PGW leadership and executives tell WHYY News that they never attended a “Phillies Corporate Sponsor Networking Event.” Additionally, no other PGW executive attended the event from 2022 to 2025, according to the statements of financial interests from several of its top leaders obtained by WHYY News.

Tom Knudsen, who held Shapiro’s position as CEO from 2001 to 2011, told WHYY News he never attended any event at Phillies spring training or anything referred to as “Phillies Corporate Sponsor Networking Event.”

Knudsen said he came in to provide a “clean sweep” after a scandal involving the former CEO James Hawes, who was indicted alongside several other executives for misusing tens of thousands of company funds for personal expenses. Hawes was acquitted but paid $22,000 in fines to the state ethics commission.

Knudsen said there would be legitimate free trips for PGW executives to attend, but said as a city-owned public utility, accountable to ratepayers, they were careful not to cross a line that would take advantage of such offers if they didn’t serve a legitimate business purpose.

“You have two legs in two worlds,” Knudsen said. “One is the [for-profit] market world and the other is the [nonprofit] public government world.”

Knudsen said that when buying natural gas, the company operated as any investor-owned utility would. But he said they were careful to remind themselves that freebies weren’t necessarily part of doing business.

While it’s typical of many for-profit businesses to accept gifts from customers or potential customers, Knudsen said, he helped establish a precedent whereby all gifts, including hospitality gifts or free tickets to concerts and sports events, would have to be vetted by PGW’s attorneys.

“We were buying natural gas as a commodity and this is done in a certain way, you don’t get breaks because you’re a nonprofit,” Knudsen said. “You have to conduct yourself as a party to transactions in that environment, and our legal department had to weigh in on that.”

Knudsen said he and other executives running the company at that time were “under a magnifying glass.”

Regarding trips to Phillies corporate sponsorship events, Knudsen emphasized that it’s been more than a decade since he ran the utility, but that during his tenure, “It would have been a reach.”

“At that time, I would not have seen a business reason for that, but I don’t know what’s going on now that would have led to that conclusion,” he said.

Knudsen said he regularly consulted attorneys at PGW while he was CEO regarding the ethics surrounding gifts and hospitality.

“We were very sensitive to how we conducted the business and how we were perceived,” Knudsen said. “Ethics were very important for us. We had to rebuild the company.”

PGW is unique not only for being a city-owned natural gas utility, but also for its complex governing structure.

Its budget is overseen by the five-member Philadelphia Gas Commission, which includes the city controller, two members appointed by the mayor and two appointed by City Council.

The Philadelphia Facilities Management Corporation is the nonprofit board that has a contract with the city to oversee PGW. Those members, whose names are not listed on PGW’s website, are appointed by the mayor. While the commission holds regular public meetings, the PFMC does not.

Seth Shapiro is a political appointee who served on the PFMC for 15 years before he was hired as PGW’s chief operating officer in 2021. At the end of that year, he took over the top job at the utility under former Mayor Jim Kenney.

Leigh Whitaker, chair of the Philadelphia Facilities Management Corporation and Shapiro’s boss, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Neither Mayor Parker nor Christy Brady, chair of the Philadelphia Gas Commission, responded to multiple requests for comment.

“It's not entirely clear sometimes who PGW reports to,” Baier said when informed of WHYY News’ reporting. “Since there’s no shareholders, there's no investors. That means that the public is the shareholder, and so there should be transparency.”

The number of different city entities overseeing PGW confuses Port Richmond resident and PGW customer Sara Baier, a Democratic committee person in the 25th Ward.

“It’s not entirely clear sometimes who PGW reports to,” Baier said when informed of WHYY News’ reporting. “Since there’s no shareholders, there’s no investors. That means that the public is the shareholder, and so there should be transparency.”

“They should be held accountable by the various governing bodies that are responsible for their operations,” she added. “I think that’s one of the problems is that there are so many various governing bodies that are overseeing PGW and … there’s not a streamlined oversight for this utility company.”

The goal of the state ethics law is “to ensure public trust in government,” Fox, the Pennsylvania State Ethics Commission’s executive director, told WHYY News.

Shapiro annually fills out a report showing freebies he’s received, as well as reimbursement for any “transportation, and lodging or hospitality” in connection with his position, as required by Pennsylvania’s ethics law.

State law does not mandate he file those disclosures with the city or state, but merely with PGW itself.

“The state Ethics Act is there to make sure that elected officials and governmental employees act honestly and they’re not conflicted by outside interests, particularly financial interests. It’s pretty simple,” said Bob Davis Jr., an attorney who has worked on government ethics cases for 50 years, including defending clients before the commission.

“The amount of or value of [gifts or hospitality] is critical. Completeness of the information has to be provided in order for the spirit of the act to be honored,” he said. “People are trying to find out whether things of value or money have been given to a public employee that might influence their decisions.”

Specifically, the disclosure law is intended to guarantee that the financial interests of public office holders doesn’t present a conflict of interest that would “conflict with the public trust.”

PGW employees do not file disclosures with the city of Philadelphia, but WHYY News asked PGW for the forms.

Davis called the fact that PGW files internally, and not with the state or city, “curious,” since the law exists for citizens to have easy access to the information.

“That is a problem, filing internally,” Davis said. “The whole idea is that a citizen can find out about a potential conflict of a governmental employee. The idea that it’s filed internally is not logical. To have to go to the entity where the person is employed, frankly, because it is a governmental regulation concerning conflicts, is a bit strange.”

Faith Williams, of the anticorruption group Common Cause, said financial disclosure laws foster accountability among public officials because they provide transparency.

“Pennsylvania’s Ethics Act requires details about gifts given to public officials, including expenses from lodging and transportation, and they require that because we need to make sure that public officials aren’t beholden to companies paying for their travel or paying for their dining or fine dining,” Williams said.

Fox said that when the commission is made aware of issues, staff contact the public official to seek compliance. She said most failures to complete forms are not intentional.

“We estimate there’s about 160,000 filers in Pennsylvania and we’re really only looking at a handful each year … less than 100 per year who really dig in their heels and refuse to correct or to file the forms,” she said.

Once the commission learns of incomplete or unfiled forms, Fox said they send out a letter to get compliance. If they can’t get compliance after the second letter, the public official could be fined $250 per year, going back five years.

“It is rare that people appear to be intentionally withholding information,” Fox said. “Usually when we see deficiencies with the form, it’s an error like they’ve missed filling out a block. It’s an unintentional error. It’s confusion about the form or it’s an oversight. We don’t see a lot of intentional failure to disclose that we’re aware of. It’s not to say it doesn’t exist.”

Williams said regardless of the intent, the gap in oversight is a problem. With an estimated 160,000 potential filers in the state, the ethics law is essentially an honor system.

“We don’t actually even know how big of a problem this potentially is, especially over the number of years that it happened,” Williams said. “We don’t know how much in excess of $650 these lodging and transportation payments were. It could be $1 over, it could be $1,000 over, and depending on how much it is, it could potentially pay for a number of people’s gas bills in Philadelphia.”

Williams emphasized that it’s no small thing to avoid these laws, which are in place to build trust in government.

“We want to ensure that Mr. Shapiro and other public officials in Philadelphia and in Pennsylvania, and frankly across the country, are making decisions based on what’s best for the public and not what’s best for them, or the companies that kind of pat their backs or they pat their backs,” said Williams.

The utility’s internal ethics code prohibits employees from accepting any gifts “where a reasonable person would believe that the offer is related to or would influence or affect” the employee’s “PGW-related duties and responsibilities.”

For gifts valued above $250, the employee must obtain written permission from the company’s ethics officer.

In a written statement to the court from an ongoing open records case on appeal by the Energy and Policy Institute, Shapiro stated that he consulted PGW’s ethics officer regarding attendance at the events listed on his statements of financial interest.

“To the extent I seek guidance regarding my attendance at an event or function, including my acceptance of gifts, hospitality, or transportation in connection with these events or functions, I seek legal advice from PGW Ethics Counsel under the Ethics Act. I do not seek approval or authorization,” reads the written statement. “All of my communications with PGW Ethics Counsel, whether verbal or in writing, regarding my attendance at an event or function have been for the sole purpose of obtaining legal advice under the Ethics Act.”

“Even the appearance of wrongdoing … really matters,” Williams said. “But I do wonder if sometimes our elected officials and our public officials think, ‘Well, no one will notice.’”

Although PGW employees, including Shapiro, are not subject to Philadelphia’s Ethics Code, it does apply to employees with the Philadelphia Gas Commission. The reason for this is unclear.

The city’s ethics law is more extensive and restrictive than state law. Each year, more than 4,000 Philadelphia city employees file both city ethics disclosures and statements of financial interests for the state, which are searchable and available online.

Williams said whether Shapiro’s failure to provide the value of hospitality gifts was intentional or not, failing to comply with the state ethics laws has an impact.

“Even the appearance of wrongdoing … really matters,” Williams said. “But I do wonder if sometimes our elected officials and our public officials think, ‘Well, no one will notice.’”

Davis said when he advised clients on compliance with ethics laws, he told them, ‘You will never be punished for overreporting.’”

“Let’s disclose it. Let’s be honest. Let’s show that you’re honest. Let’s show that you’re not afraid of scrutiny,” Davis said. “The form asks for information and it needs to be given with appropriate detail in order for the whole policy underlying the act to be realized. [Otherwise] it’s doing a dance to make it look like you’re allowing public review of what’s going on and you’re really not.”

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