I started this seven-part series talking about a fire hydrant in the Philadelphia neighborhood I grew up in. And I want to end it by talking about what I want for my own children, and for all future generations.

I want my kids to be able to turn on a tap 20 years from now and get clean, safe water. I want them to be able to safely fish in Brandywine Creek. I want all the families in Chester County and across the commonwealth to have access to clean, safe, affordable water and to know that the General Assembly watched out for them as corporate consolidation and data center water use threatened our water bills and our water supply.

So how do we ensure that future, and what does finishing the job look like, from a policy standpoint? We have several of the pieces in place, but we have more work to be done to complete the whole puzzle.

This week, I introduced the Pennsylvania Water Resource Act (HB 2682), which would assess a fee on extraordinary water users like data center operators, with higher fees for consumptive uses like evaporative cooling, where the water withdrawn is never returned to the source. The fees collected would be used for the protection, conservation, and remediation of our watersheds and freshwater sources. 

In April, the House passed HB 2150, the Data Center Energy and Water Reporting Act, and HB 2246, Water Usage Reporting Requirements for Data Centers. These bills would create disclosure and reporting requirements around data center water consumption. Both await consideration in the Senate Environmental Resources & Energy Committee.

As discussed at more length in Part 5 of this series, Pennsylvania must complete the stressed watershed designations required under the 2002 Water Resources Planning Act. Four watersheds were identified as candidates fifteen years ago, but not one has been formally designated. Completing those designations and requiring heightened review for large water withdrawals in stressed areas would allow us to complete work already on the books, using authority already granted by the legislature.

We must also update our groundwater law so that communities have legal standing to protect their water before a well goes dry, not after. Right now, the remedy is a lawsuit funded by taxpayers, fought against corporations with far greater legal resources. We can do better.

None of these proposals are radical; instead, they allow us to set the terms under which growth happens, terms that protect the people of our commonwealth and uphold the constitutional right to pure water that our General Assembly has an obligation to defend.

Pennsylvania has a long, expensive history of boom and bust, and of allowing extractive industry to drive environmental and economic policy to the detriment of our communities, our environment, and our public health. If we allow the same history to repeat itself with regard to our water, there may be no coming back from that.

The good news is that we still have time to write a different ending. All it takes is the political will to act.

Rep. Danielle Friel Otten represents Chester County’s 155th District and serves as Chair of the PA Legislative Climate Caucus. This is Part 7 of a 7-part series on Pennsylvania water policy.

In rural Arizona, there is a stretch of farmland where a Saudi Arabian company spent years growing alfalfa in the desert. To grow alfalfa in the desert you need enormous amounts of water. The company exploited Arizona’s lenient rural groundwater laws, drilling wells and pumping groundwater from a natural underground aquifer formed over thousands of years. Because the land sat outside Arizona’s active water management area, nobody tracked the withdrawals and nobody set limits. The water went into the alfalfa, the alfalfa went into hay bales, the hay bales went onto ships, and the ships went to Saudi Arabia.

Arizona’s water left Arizona in the form of hay, and there was no law to stop it.

By the time Arizona closed the loophole, aquifer levels in that area had dropped measurably. The damage was not catastrophic, but it was permanent. A water supply that took thousands of years to accumulate will not be replenished on any timeline that matters to the people who currently rely on it.

What happened in Arizona is called virtual water trade. You do not have to pipe the water itself out of a state to export it; you can turn it into something else, like a crop or a product, and ship that product somewhere else. The water is gone either way. And Arizona is not unique. The entire Southwest is living with the consequences of generations of treating water as if it were unlimited, building cities and allocating river rights based on assumptions of abundance.

Pennsylvania’s version of the virtual water trade looks different, but the underlying structure is the same. A data center draws millions of gallons from a Pennsylvania aquifer, uses it for evaporative cooling, and the computing power serves global internet traffic. The water is gone from your watershed, the profits go to big tech corporations, electric distribution companies, and electricity generators, and the aquifer is depleted, unable to recover on any timeline that matters to the people who live here.

And just like in Arizona, while communities are left to contend with the loss of their water, those profits will be realized elsewhere. Data centers being built in Pennsylvania are backed by multi-billion-dollar tech companies and large multinational firms. A growing number of states have passed laws restricting foreign adversary entities from owning land adjacent to critical water infrastructure or overlying key aquifers, to prevent scenarios like the one in Arizona. Pennsylvania is not among them. We still have work to do on water protections in general, whether foreign or domestic. And our foreign ownership law does not address water or groundwater rights, does not cover land near critical water infrastructure, and has no enforcement mechanism tied to our water permitting system.

Pennsylvania is genuinely water-rich, with 80 trillion gallons underground, 86,000 miles of streams, and reliable rainfall. But water was once abundant in the rivers and aquifers of the Southwest, too, before a century of unmanaged extraction took its toll.

We are at the stage where the right framework, built now, could protect Pennsylvania from a future water crisis. Colorado dedicated $101 million from sports betting revenue to fund water conservation projects in a single year. Texas built a 20-year, $20 billion water resilience package. These were not emergency responses; they were proactive decisions made by states that chose to act before the crisis, not after.

Pennsylvania has advantages those states did not have when they made their critical decisions: We have a constitution that guarantees the right to pure water, a planning framework that only needs to be finished, and we still have enough time to get it right. Now is the time to act.

Rep. Danielle Friel Otten represents Chester County’s 155th District and serves as Chair of the PA Legislative Climate Caucus. This is Part 6 of a 7-part series on Pennsylvania water policy.

Under Pennsylvania’s common‑law doctrine of groundwater rights, a landowner is generally entitled to pump as much water as they want from beneath their property for any lawful use, even if that pumping dries up a neighbor’s well. If the use is considered “reasonable,” the person with the deepest well and the biggest pump wins.

This doctrine was established during the Industrial Revolution, when the nation’s predominant goal was to promote economic growth and development. While industrial uses were emerging, it was still a world of hand‑dug wells, small farms, and communities that drew modest amounts of water from shallow aquifers. The rules were never designed for hyperscale data centers or fracking operators drawing millions of gallons a day from a shared groundwater source or for the scale and speed of modern industrial development.

More than 150 years later, Pennsylvania still lacks a statewide groundwater‑permitting system. Most eastern states that have faced water stress have adopted some sort of formal process requiring review, approval, and monitoring before large withdrawals begin. While these systems don’t prevent development, they can help to ensure that heavy consumptive users don’t jeopardize the water supplies of the people and communities around them.

The lack of a statewide permitting system means that Pennsylvania relies on a patchwork of old court rulings, independent river basin commissions, and a 2002 registration law that tracks large water withdrawals but does not limit them. .

The water supply for most of the commonwealth, about 72% of the population, falls under the jurisdiction of one of two major river basin commissions across the state: the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC), which serves the central part of the state, and the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), which serves the eastern counties, including Chester County.

The SRBC and DRBC are independent, interstate agencies established through compacts between the federal government and participating states, authorized to issue permits and approvals for water withdrawals and impose civil penalties for unauthorized water use. To some extent, these commissions fill the regulatory gap created by the absence of a comprehensive statewide water permitting system, but their jurisdictions are limited, their structure limits the ability of any one state to exert power over the agency’s decisions, and their operation is dependent on financial support from state legislatures. Pennsylvania has significantly fallen far short of its annual funding commitment to the DRBC and SRBC in every state budget since 2014.

Pennsylvania’s western counties, comprising about one third of the state, are covered by the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, which monitors and controls water quality and water pollution but does not regulate withdrawals. That means a data center or other large industrial user in that part of the state can drill a well, register the withdrawal, and start pumping. If a neighboring community’s water supply drops, the only remedy is a lawsuit, paid for by taxpayers, waged against a corporation with far greater legal resources, and fought after the damage is done. By the time a case reaches a courtroom, the community’s wells may already be dry.

We have already seen this pattern unfold in parts of Virginia, Arizona, and Texas, where data‑center development outpaced the regulatory framework. In each case, communities discovered the limits of state water laws only after their water levels fell.

Pennsylvania still has a chance to get ahead of this issue, and we have some of the building blocks in place:

• We have the constitutional foundation: Article I, Section 27 guarantees every Pennsylvanian the right to pure water. That language places a duty on the state to act before harm occurs, not after.

• We have the beginnings of a planning framework under the 2002 Water Resources Planning Act, which was supposed to identify stressed watersheds and trigger heightened protections. But the state never completed that work. Not one stressed watershed has ever been formally designated, even though four were identified as candidates fifteen years ago.

The fix is straightforward

Enacting strong, statewide water protections in Pennsylvania would not require radical reform. It would just mean finishing the work already on the books and aligning our laws with the realities of today’s water demands:

• Establish a statewide permitting system. Require permits for large surface and groundwater withdrawals in every part of the state, including counties not covered by a river basin commission. Require heavy users to demonstrate that their pumping won’t harm neighbors or public water supplies.

• Impose a fee on extraordinary water users, with higher fees for consumptive uses like evaporative cooling, where the water withdrawn is never returned to the source. This fee would create a reliable funding mechanism to cover Pennsylvania’s commitment to the river basin commissions and would also provide funds to protect our watersheds.

• Complete the stressed‑watershed designations the law already calls for, unlocking stronger protections where they are most needed. If Pennsylvania completed its stressed watershed designations under the 2002 Water Resources Planning Act, those designations could inform and strengthen commission review standards. The commissions set their own approval criteria; the state could advocate for heightened scrutiny in watersheds the DEP has formally identified as stressed.

• Give communities the information and legal standing to protect their water before a well runs dry, not after, and not at taxpayer expense. Formalize data-sharing agreements between river basin commissions and state agencies to leverage existing metering, monitoring, and hydrological data.

• Require cumulative impact review of large withdrawals. SRBC and DRBC review individual projects against individual withdrawal thresholds, but what happens when five data centers draw from the same aquifer in the same watershed? Pennsylvania should establish formal cumulative review protocols that treat a cluster of large withdrawals as a single regulatory concern.

• Push for lower thresholds and earlier environmental review for consumptive uses. A hyperscale data center can consume five to 10 million gallons per day. Pennsylvania could enact legislation to create tiered thresholds that trigger earlier review for high consumptive use categories or a separate permitting track that requires stringent environmental review before site selection or approval.

No Pennsylvanian should lose their water to a bigger pump

Outdated water laws that leave room for Pennsylvanians to lose their drinking water because a tech company could afford to drill deeper are not consistent with a state constitution that guarantees the right to pure water. And they are not consistent with the kind of future we want for our communities, one where economic growth is balanced with stewardship, and where every Pennsylvanian can trust that their water is clean, protected, and secure.

NEXT IN THE SERIES:

“What Arizona Learned the Hard Way” — The Southwest’s water crisis did not happen overnight. It happened because states treated abundance as permanent. Pennsylvania still has time to learn that lesson without living it.

Rep. Danielle Friel Otten represents Chester County’s 155th District and serves as Chair of the PA Legislative Climate Caucus. This is Part 5 of a 7-part series on Pennsylvania water policy.

Of all the modern conveniences I’m grateful for, clean running water is high at the top of the list. It’s easy to take it for granted, particularly in our water-rich commonwealth, without thinking too much about the aquifers deep underground that took thousands of years to fill, the treatment plants that clean and pressurize our water before it ever reaches our faucets, or the pipes that run under our roads and lawns to deliver clean water straight to the tap.

The average Pennsylvanian uses about 62 gallons of water per day, or about 250 gallons per day for a family of four, and the PUC website is full of tips for how to conserve water, especially during times of drought. But a hyperscale data center can withdraw as much as five million gallons of water per day. That’s as much water as 80,000 people—almost four times the population of the Borough of West Chester and nearly 10 times the population of the Borough of Downingtown—and no one is limiting their consumption or requiring them to use water more efficiently.

Why so much water?
Data centers generate an enormous amount of heat. A data center is a building filled with servers that store, process, and manage vast amounts of data to power websites, cloud computing, AI models, communications, streaming services, financial transactions, and other digital services. And those servers run hot. Without continuous cooling, they would fail. The most common way to cool them at scale is through a water-intensive process called evaporative cooling. Cold water absorbs the heat, and the warmed water is released into cooling towers where it evaporates into the air.

With this cooling method, as much as 80% of the water withdrawn by a data center is lost to evaporation. It does not go back into the groundwater table or return to the local reservoir. Instead, the water that evaporates becomes part of the atmosphere. It eventually falls somewhere as rain or snow, but not necessarily in the area where it was withdrawn, not on any useful timeline, and not in a way a local water authority or public water utility can predict or plan around. This is called consumptive use, and it is fundamentally different from how most water uses work. When your dishwasher, shower, or washing machine uses water, that water eventually finds its way back into the local system. But a data center’s cooling towers remove water from the local supply.

One proposed data center campus in northeastern Pennsylvania would have a daily water footprint equivalent to more than 53,000 people, and there are more than 20 similar campus-scale data center projects planned for that region alone. The Delaware River watershed, which supplies drinking water to more than 15 million people in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, is where much of this development is headed because of the availability of land, water, high-voltage power lines, and fiber optic connectivity in the region.

Last week, we talked about the fact that Pennsylvania requires these facilities to disclose almost nothing about their water use. Our commonwealth does not impose any efficiency standards specific to water, and large-scale industrial users are not required to pass any meaningful review to demonstrate that their withdrawals will not harm the watershed. This means a facility that consumes more water than an entire town every single day can build and operate in Pennsylvania with no water efficiency requirements whatsoever.

This week, the House passed HB 2150, a bill that would require data centers to report their energy and water use annually to DEP, with fines imposed for failure to comply with the reporting requirements. This bill does nothing to limit use, and it still needs to clear the Senate, but it is a start.

We still need to go much further to protect the waters of our commonwealth and the interests of water utility customers. We need efficiency standards, watershed protections, ratepayer protections, and a rigorous permitting system for large groundwater withdrawals.

The bill that passed this week will help us get a better picture of how much is being taken, and from where. The next step is passing laws to ensure that the legislature and our regulatory agencies uphold our constitutional mandate to conserve, protect, and maintain our clean water as a public trust, “for the benefit of all the people” of Pennsylvania.

WHERE THIS STANDS IN HARRISBURG:

HB 2150 passed the PA House on April 13, 2026, and now moves to the Senate. It requires data centers with 10+MW peak demand to file annual water and energy use reports with the DEP and imposes penalties of $10,000/day for non-compliance. It is a necessary first step, but reporting alone does not limit consumption. Efficiency standards and watershed protections must be the next legislative priority.

NEXT IN THE SERIES:

The Deepest Well Wins: Why Pennsylvania’s water use law is built on 19th century doctrine, what that means for your well and your neighbor’s, and why the person (or corporation) with the biggest pump still wins.

Rep. Danielle Friel Otten represents Chester County’s 155th District and serves as Chair of the PA Legislative Climate Caucus. This is Part 4 of a 7-part series on Pennsylvania water policy.

If you’ve been tracking your electric bills lately, you already know that the price you’re paying today pay per kilowatt-hour of electricity has changed drastically compared to the rate per kWh just a few years ago. (You can find your price per kWh on page 2 of your PECO bill.) Today, I want to talk about some of the reasons for that increase and the steps Pennsylvania can take to prevent the same thing from happening to your future water bills.

Right now, we’re living in a perfect storm of utility bill impacts. We’ve just been through one of the coldest winters in recent memory, global tensions are driving oil and gas prices through the roof, and both actual and forecast data center demand is sending electricity prices skyrocketing. But while data centers have understandably been front page news in Pennsylvania in recent months, the main cause of our demand-driven rate hikes isn’t data center development in PA; it’s data center development in Virginia.

Pennsylvania is part of a regional electric grid operated by PJM, which serves 13 states and more than 65 million people. Every year, PJM runs what is called a capacity market auction, where utilities across all 13 states purchase future capacity to ensure that they’ll have enough power available when demand peaks. Because the PJM energy grid is interconnected across all 13 states, increased demand in one state drives up total demand across the grid. Higher demand means higher auction prices, which in turn means higher electric bills for ratepayers in every state.

Virginia is one of the 13 states in the PJM grid, and northern Virginia is home to the largest data center market on the planet, with more than 250 data centers handling roughly 70% of global internet traffic and consuming massive amounts of electricity in the process. And while the data centers themselves are concentrated in Virginia, the costs are spread across the grid, through the shared capacity market, to every utility and every ratepayer in the PJM region.

[Image source: Virginia Economic Development Partnership]

With dozens more data centers proposed in Pennsylvania, Virginia and the other states in the PJM region, we’ve talked a lot about the need to protect residential and small business ratepayers from shouldering energy costs caused by real or projected data center demand. It’s time to start talking about how to apply the same type of protections to water.

Water utilities in our region operate differently from electric utilities. There’s no regional grid; a local public water supply can come from a large private utility or a municipal water authority owned and operated by a local government. And more than 3.5 million Pennsylvanians, representing about 25% of all Pennsylvania households, get their water from a private well, which relies on clean, ample groundwater supply.

Data centers require industrial-scale cooling, which requires massive amounts of water. Most data centers receive their water from the same local or corporate water utilities that serve the public. In Virginia, their water withdrawals are regulated by Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality.

Pennsylvania currently has no rule limiting how much water a data center or other large-scale industrial customer can consume. No efficiency standard. No disclosure requirement. And no consumer protections to prevent water utilities from passing along increased costs created by large scale users to their residential water customers. There are also no laws in Pennsylvania that would restrict or prohibit a data center from digging a private well to extract water directly from our groundwater aquifers. Left unregulated, data center water use could be devastating for Pennsylvania, not only creating issues with water scarcity, but potentially changing and affecting our underground aquifers and groundwater systems.

If the merger between Essential Utilities (AQUA) and American Water goes through, the new entity will serve portions of at least 17 states, and every one of those states is facing data center development. So while there’s no regional grid for water the way there is for electricity, the expanding Aqua and American Water footprint means water customers in one state will be increasingly exposed to higher costs in another, if the utility needs to build out infrastructure to meet the demands of data center water use.

In March, the Pennsylvania House passed HB 2150, which would require data centers to report their water and energy use annually. But there’s more we must do, both to protect our clean water as a natural resource and to prevent consumers’ water bills from following the same trajectory as electric bills.

WHERE THIS STANDS IN HARRISBURG:

HB 2150, the Data Center Energy and Water Reporting Act, passed the PA House and now moves to the Senate. It would require annual public reporting of water and energy consumption for data centers with 10+ megawatts of peak demand. HB 1834, the Data Center Act, also passed the House. It prohibits cost-shifting of data center infrastructure expenses to other ratepayers and requires data centers to contribute to LIHEAP and clean energy funds. Both bills await action in the Senate.

NEXT IN THE SERIES:

“Five Million Gallons a Day — and Nobody’s Counting” — The scale of data center water consumption, why it is different from every other industrial user, and what Pennsylvania can do about it.

Rep. Danielle Friel Otten represents Chester County’s 155th District and serves as Chair of the PA Legislative Climate Caucus. This is Part 3 of a 7-part series on Pennsylvania water policy.

As we talked about in last week’s post, Pennsylvanians’ right to pure water was enshrined in our state constitution in 1971. This week, I want to talk some more about events happening right now that could put that constitutional right to the test.

The two largest regulated water utilities in the country have announced an agreement to merge. This merger would combine American Water Works (the parent company of Pennsylvania American Water) and Essential Utilities (the parent company of Aqua PA) into a mega-corporation with a market capitalization of $40 billion and an overall enterprise value of $63 billion. If you are an Aqua customer or a PA American Water customer, this merger directly affects you. And if you live in a municipality with its own municipal water authority, this merger could affect your future water bills as well.

The companies’ official press release cites “enhanced scale and operational efficiency” as the reason for the merger and claims that there will be “no change in customer rates.” But history suggests otherwise. In fact, customers regularly see significant jumps in water and wastewater bills when utilities consolidate. This phenomenon affects not only current utility customers but also municipal water customers whose municipal authorities will be left with fewer options and less leverage, should they need to privatize their water system.

Right now, when a municipality in southeastern Pennsylvania decides it can no longer afford to run its own water system and puts it out to bid, there are two utilities that typically bid on the takeover, Essential Utilities (Aqua) and American Water. While more choices would be better, having two utilities competing for the bid means your municipality at least has some bargaining power to push for things like service guarantees, rate caps, and infrastructure commitments.

If this merger goes through, there will be one bid, from the one enormous water utility remaining in our region. What does that do to your municipality’s bargaining power? What does it do to yours? When there is no competition, there is no incentive to keep your rates down, your pipes fixed, or your phone calls answered.

This consolidation of our water infrastructure into fewer and fewer private hands is especially concerning at a time when Pennsylvanians are already feeling the impact of data center growth and corporate profits on our rising electric bills. If we fail to act, those same projects, which consume staggering amounts of water, are poised to drive up our water bills too. 

A single large data center can consume up to five million gallons of water per day. Pennsylvania currently has no rule limiting how much water these facilities can take. We do not even require them to tell the public how much they are using. More than 20 hyperscale data centers are in the planning pipeline in Pennsylvania right now. If those data centers get built, they are going to need water. And someone is going to have to pay for the costs driven by increased demand and related infrastructure development.

A consolidated water utility with no competition has very little reason to fight costs on your behalf. And as we’ve seen it play out before, if the utility’s costs rise—or if the utility can make the argument that they expect their costs to rise—the utility will go to the Public Utility Commission, ask for a rate increase, and usually get one. The utility’s profits are protected, at ratepayers’ expense.

Water is not a luxury; it is a necessity. And in Pennsylvania, clean water is a right. The fewer private entities that control our access to this essential natural resource, the more our constitutional right comes under threat. In future installments of this series, we will talk about proposed legislation that would protect Pennsylvania’s clean water and protect Pennsylvania’s water customers from subsidizing corporate profits.

Right now, it’s important to know that the PUC has the ability and authority to approve or reject the merger between Essential Utilities and American Water and to impose conditions including rate protections, affordability commitments, and infrastructure investment guarantees.

A series of upcoming hearings on the merger will give the public an opportunity to weigh in. In Chester County, in-person hearings are scheduled for Wednesday, April 22, at Penn State Great Valley in Malvern, with sessions at 1 p.m. and 6 p.m.

No pre-registration is available or required to attend an in-person hearing. Individuals wishing to testify may sign up upon arrival at the venue.

Telephonic hearings will be held April 28 at 1 p.m. and 6 p.m., at 888-547-8922, passcode 74903461. Pre-registration is encouraged if you wish to testify at a telephonic hearing.

Your voice matters. You don’t need a long speech; in fact, shorter is better. You just need a willingness to attend, engage, and share your concerns with the PUC.

As your state representative, I will be urging the PUC to either reject this merger or impose strict, enforceable requirements including rate protections, transparency requirements, and service quality guarantees as a nonnegotiable condition of approval. Chester County residents and all Pennsylvania water utility customers have the right to safe, reliable water at an affordable rate.

NEXT IN THE SERIES:
Data centers have already increased your electric bill. Is your water bill next? — How the same forces that threaten the power grid are coming for your water system, and why ratepayers always end up holding the bag.

Rep. Danielle Friel Otten represents Chester County’s 155th District and serves as Chair of the PA Legislative Climate Caucus. This is Part 2 of a 7-part series on Pennsylvania water policy.

I grew up in a Philadelphia neighborhood where the kids ran through fire hydrants in August and nobody thought twice about where the water came from. It came from the tap. It was cold and clean, and it cost almost nothing.

I still think about water that way sometimes, as I bet many of us do. Pennsylvania is one of the most water-rich states in the country, with an estimated 80 trillion gallons of water in underground aquifers, 2.5 trillion more gallons on the surface in our lakes, reservoirs, and 83,000 miles of streams and rivers; and more than 40 inches of rainfall in an average year. Turn on the tap. Something comes out. Why worry?

Here is why I’m worried, and why I wanted to dive into this series about Pennsylvania’s water resources and water rights, and what we should be doing, right now, to protect them.

Pennsylvania’s water abundance is real. It is also, at this moment, something of a liability. Because when you have a lot of something, it is easy to take it for granted and act as though you will always have a lot of it. We have spent generations treating our water supply as if it were infinite, building our laws, our industries, and our expectations around that assumption. But the world has changed in ways that assumption cannot survive.

In 1971, Pennsylvania voters amended our state constitution to guarantee every Pennsylvanian “a right to “clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.”.

This language, enacted as the Environmental Rights Amendment, became Article I, Section 27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution. It is not a policy preference, not an abstract goal, but a constitutional right, sitting right next to freedom of speech and the right to a fair trial. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has confirmed it twice in the last fifteen years. The amendment further states that “Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come.”

Under this amendment, the Commonwealth is legally required to conserve, protect, and maintain these natural resources as a public trust, “for the benefit of all the people” of Pennsylvania.

So, we have the water. We have the constitutional protection. What’s the problem?

The problem is the gap between what the constitution guarantees and what the law actually does. Right now, Pennsylvania has no statewide system to track how much groundwater is being withdrawn or by whom beyond basic registration and reporting requirements that operate more or less on an honor system. We have no efficiency standards for industrial users. We passed a law in 2002 requiring the state to identify and protect our most stressed watersheds. The Department of Environmental Protection did the work and delivered its report, and then we never finished the job. Today, we are standing at the edge of the largest wave of industrial water demand this state has ever seen, with regulations crafted for a different era.

Over the next few weeks, I will walk through exactly what is happening to Pennsylvania’s water--who is buying control of it, who is consuming it at industrial scale, and what the absence of fundamental rules means for the sustainability of our water supply and for the water bill you pay every month if you are among the 60% of Chester County residents who rely on public water.

There are clear steps we can take, and we still have time to get it right. But the sooner we act, the better. The window of opportunity may be closing sooner than we’d like to think.

NEXT IN THE SERIES: “Who Owns Your Water?”
The merger of the two largest private water companies in Pennsylvania, what it means for your rates, and why competition matters more than you think.

Rep. Danielle Friel Otten represents Chester County’s 155th District and serves as Chair of the PA Legislative Climate Caucus. This is Part 1 of a 7-part series on Pennsylvania water policy.