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WHEREAS, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) proposed Revised Definition of "Waters of the United States" and urging the Agencies to preserve the 2015 Clean Water Rule, which included wetlands, headwaters, and intermittent and ephemeral streams in the definition of "Waters of the United States."; and,
WHEREAS, the 2015 Clean Water Rule clarified the term "Waters of the United States," which defines the extent of waters protected under the Clean Water Act's suite of pollution prevention, control, and clean-up programs, and,
WHEREAS, The Clean Water Act is the fundamental federal law protecting the Waters of the United States from pollution, degradation and destruction; and,
WHEREAS, The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has water resources that are abundant and vital to overall ecosystem health and economic well-being of the Commonwealth with approximately 86,000 miles of streams, 404,000 acres of wetlands, 161,445 acres of lakes, 17 square miles of the Delaware estuary, and 63 miles of Great Lakes shorefront; and,
WHEREAS, our streams provide drinking water for roughly 63% of our citizens; are critical to our economy, including small breweries that are supporting over 21,000 jobs and our wildlife tourism and recreation industry which generates $2.8 billion; and,
WHEREAS, our wetlands perform vital cost-free filtration of drinking water and source water, often in the headwaters regions as well as contain many of our rare, threatened, and endangered species, reflecting their critical importance to the conservation of biodiversity within the Commonwealth, and provide critical flows for our State fish, the brook trout; and,
WHEREAS, the proposed rollback will weaken protections for drinking water sources at a time when our drinking water sources are increasingly threatened by the impacts of climate change, outdated and failing infrastructure, and growing pollution from unregulated contaminants and industrial so...
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