Pa. business advocates celebrate Trump’s Clean Water rollback

Meanwhile, environmental groups like the Chesapeake Bay Foundation say the move is an “assault” on clean water.

Katie Meyer/WITF

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Katie Meyer was WITF’s Capitol Bureau Chief from 2016-2020. While at WITF, she covered all things state politics for public radio stations throughout Pennsylvania. Katie came to Harrisburg by way of New York City, where she worked at Fordham University’s public radio station, WFUV, as an anchor, general assignment reporter, and co-host of an original podcast. A 2016 graduate of Fordham, she earned several awards for her work at WFUV, including four 2016 Gracies.

Katie is a native New Yorker, though she originally hails from Troy, a little farther up the Hudson River. She can attest that the bagels are still pretty good there.

WITF's Capitol Bureau Chief Desk is partially funded through generous gifts made in the memory of Tony May through the Anthony J. May Memorial Fund.

For more information about Tony May, click here.

Kimberly Paynter / WHYY

The Delaware River in Water Gap, Pa.

September 12, 2019 | 8:23 PM

(Harrisburg) — The Trump administration’s new plan to repeal an Obama-era clean water regulation has been met with deeply mixed reactions in Pennsylvania, and across the country.

Business advocates largely support the change, but environmentalists say it would be terrible for rivers, streams, and other waterways.

The regulation in question is known as Waters of the United States, or WOTUS.

President Barack Obama’s administration rolled it out in 2015—an expansion of the existing Clean Water Act that applied federal pollution controls to smaller waterways, like streams and wetlands.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency said it plans to redefine which waterways are federally protected, and which are left to the states.

Farmers and business owners have long decried WOTUS as overreach. Kevin Sunday, with the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry said it caused permitting confusion.

“Businesses in Pennsylvania certainly want to do the right thing,” he said. “It’s just a question of interstate waterways—Susquehanna, clearly an interstate waterway, right? Conodoguinet feeding into that? Maybe. The stormwater runoff that’s going into the Conodoguinet? Possibly.”

Environmental groups, however, say WOTUS has been vital in protecting waterways.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, for instance, called the administration’s move an “assault” on clean water that “ignores the EPA’s own science.”

The foundation added, it is concerned the Trump administration aims to go further, and roll back protections on waterways from the original Clean Water Act.

An earlier version of this article misidentified Kevin Sunday as an employee of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association. Sunday actually works for the Chamber of Business and Industry.