CHESAPEAKE BAY WATERSHED — During a roundtable held Sunday, March 2, elected officials from Northeast Pennsylvania raised concerns over a “rain tax,” which they said unfairly impacts property owners in the Northeast Pennsylvania portion of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. 

“This is something that we get hundreds if not thousands of calls on,” said Representative Rob Bresnahan, the newly-elected congressman for PA-08 and the organizer of the roundtable. “Because ultimately the funding goes to… clean up the Chesapeake Bay, which is hundreds of miles away from the people in Northeastern Pennsylvania.”

The Wyoming Valley Sanitary Authority (WVSA), which provides wastewater treatment for 36 municipalities in Luzerne County, oversees Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) permits throughout its coverage area. MS4 permits ensure that municipalities have stormwater drainage systems separate from their sewer systems. 

According to a resolution from the Luzerne County Council, signed in 2020, “this MS4 program has been made more stringent and made compulsory to the people of Luzerne County purportedly to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, a body of water totally outside the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

The more stringent MS4 requirements come from a federal executive order, said Representative Brenda Pugh (R-Luzerne). She said that while neighboring regions in the Chesapeake Bay watershed aren’t following the order, “our residents are bearing the burden of following this procedure, this federal order that came down, this mandate that we had to do it.”

“What WVSA did is they compiled municipalities together, and they’re doing what they were designed to do, what they were instructed to do by the federal government—separate stormwater from your wastewater systems. And that’s exactly what we had to do,” but ultimately there needs to be funding to support it, said Bresnahan. 

“This unfunded mandate, MS4, the ‘rain tax,’ is a substantial burden on the People of Luzerne County,” reads the Luzerne County Council resolution. The council opposed the MS4 program and prepared to ask then President Trump to halt the MS4 program. 

It was close to ending during the first Trump administration—President Trump did an interview with local media in 2020 talking specifically about the rain tax—but efforts to can it got shelved when the Biden administration came in, participants at the roundtable said. 

Now, with Trump back in office, participants at the roundtable were hopeful that he could finish the job. 

According to participants at the roundtable, it would take some time to unravel the bureaucratic structure that has arisen to implement the mandate, but a declaration from the federal level that it is not a federal mandate would be the first step of that process.