Legislative Budget and Finance Committee Reports on Growing Greener 2

As required by Pennsylvania House Resolution 2009-17, the nonpartisan Legislative Budget and Finance Committee reviewed Growing Greener 2. Download the committee’s report by clicking on the following link: Review of the Commonwealth’s Growing Greener II Initiative.

Growing Greener 2 has had positive economic and environmental impacts across the state, saving hundreds of farms, bringing streams back to life, improving state parks, creating thousands of jobs, plugging hundreds of abandoned and leaking gas wells, remediating abandoned strip mines, preserving tens of thousands of acres of green space important to communities, and more.

More than 60 percent of Pennsylvania voters approved the $625 Growing Greener bond in a statewide initiative in May 2005. However, the bond money from Growing Greener 2 is essentially gone. Unless Growing Greener is renewed, the number of land conservation, recreation and water protection projects initiated in Pennsylvania’s local communities in the coming decade will be a small fraction of those completed in the previous decade.