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The passage of Growing Greener will help protect Pennsylvania’s open space and natural heritage.
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Over the next six years, $625 million will be spent in Pennsylvania to clean up rivers and streams, preserve and expand our open spaces, clean up hazardous waste sites, and otherwise protect and preserve Pennsylvania’s natural resources for the future.
This injection of environmental money will take place because voters approved a statewide ballot initiative to increase funding for Pennsylvania’s Growing Greener program by $625 million on the May 17 primary ballot.
Some of the projects being funded include:
• $230 million for watershed protection, cleaning up mining pollution, and brownfields remediation.
• $217.5 million for improvements to state parks and forests, community parks and open space preservation.
• $80 million for farmland preservation.
• $50 million for downtown redevelopment related to smart growth.
• Up to $50 million to clean up hazardous waste sites across the Commonwealth.
By a nearly two-to-one margin, Democrat, Republican and Independent voters showed their support for this initiative. Not only did voters in heavily Democratic leaning counties like Philadelphia and Allegheny overwhelmingly support this proposal, but voters in predominantly Republican counties like Chester, Bucks, Lancaster, Dauphin and Centre also passed the initiative.
With such an overwhelming show of public support at the polls, legislators followed suit in the following weeks, quickly moving ahead with the necessary implementation legislation that would serve as a map for allocating this environmental funding.
Over the past fifteen months, PennEnvironment staff and citizen members played a critical role in persuading the state’s elected officials to put this question on the ballot, and worked diligently to ensure a high voter turnout in support of the proposal. This included PennEnvironment’s extensive work lobbying the state’s politicians, educating and activating concerned citizens, and working to get out the vote on Election Day.
While some elected officials offered misguided proposals for implementation of the voter-approved
Growing Greener ballot initiative—including requests to use the money for wasteful county block grants and schemes to raid Pennsylvania’s recycling funding to pay for the ballot initiative—level heads prevailed to halt these concepts..
“This is one of the most important environmental victories for Pennsylvania in recent years,” said PennEnvironment Director David Masur. “And our members can be proud that PennEnvironment’s advocacy and citizen organizing played a critical role. Our members and the citizens across the state who took time to make a phone call, send an email, or get out and vote for Growing Greener on May 17 should pat themselves on the back for a job well done.”
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