Pennsylvanians’ right to pure water is guaranteed under Article 1, Section 27 of our state constitution, which designates Pennsylvania’s public natural resources “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 our natural resources as a public trust, “for the benefit of all the people” of Pennsylvania. But there is a sizeable gap between what the constitution guarantees and what the law does.
 
Our commonwealth has ground water and surface water in abundant supply, but 37% of the streams and rivers in our state are impaired, up from 34% in 2024. Largescale corporate and industrial water users, including data centers, present a growing threat to this irreplaceable resource, withdrawing massive quantities of water from the commonwealth’s waterways and paying nothing for it.
 
A single hyperscale data center can withdraw as much as five million gallons of water per day, and the evaporative cooling used by data centers is considered a “consumptive use,” meaning the water is not returned to the water system from which it was taken. With clean, fresh water becoming scarce in parts of the United States, now is the time to protect Pennsylvania’s precious water resources, which rightfully belong to all people of this commonwealth.
 
That is why I am updating and reintroducing legislation that would assess a fee on extraordinary water users (those who withdraw more than 10,000 gallons per day) for removing water from Pennsylvania waterways, with higher fees for those who remove water and never return it and for those who withdraw at least one million gallons per day. The fees collected will be used for the protection, conservation, and remediation of our watersheds and fresh water sources.
 
Please join me in this effort to protect the waters of our commonwealth, ensure that the costs of water infrastructure, protection, and conservation are properly placed with the largest commercial users, and uphold our constitutional responsibility to protect Pennsylvanians’ right to pure water for generations to come.