The Great Lakes hold nearly 20 percent of the world’s surface freshwater, making them a resource of national and international importance. They power regional economies, support shipping routes vital to global trade, and provide drinking water to 40 million people across the U.S. and Canada. Safeguarding the Great Lakes is not only essential for the communities that rely on them daily, but also for the stability of North America’s environment, economy, and international partnerships.
Fresh is a weekly newsletter from Circle of Blue that unpacks the biggest international, state, and local policy news stories facing the Great Lakes region today. Sign up for Fresh: A Great Lakes Policy Briefing, straight to your inbox, every Wednesday.
— Christian Thorsberg, Fresh Editor
Weekly Watershed
- Two separate bills requiring data center transparency are at odds in the Wisconsin Legislature, with key differences stemming from how clean energy would be used and where it would be installed.
- A bill prohibiting any municipality from banning natural gas development or infrastructure installation has passed out of the Michigan House.
- Legislative efforts in New York to expand PFAS testing and water monitoring have stalled and been vetoed in recent weeks — but bill sponsors are not giving up.
- Michigan legislators are seeking to ban perchloroethylene, a common dry cleaning solvent and carcinogen that is a primary pollutant at Superfund sites across the state.
Fresh from the Great Lakes News Collaborative
- Nuclear waste site assessment begins in northern Ontario — The Narwhal
- Slotkin: Years later, Flint water crisis still causing lasting harm — Michigan Public
- Why the Edmund Fitzgerald is More Than a Maritime Tragedy — Great Lakes Now
- Whitmer wants Michigan to be a hub for ‘geologic hydrogen.’ What’s that? — Bridge Michigan
Bridge Michigan, Circle of Blue, Great Lakes Now at Detroit Public Television, Michigan Public and The Narwhal work together to report on the most pressing threats to the Great Lakes region’s water. This independent journalism is supported by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Find all the work here.
The Lead
New York state legislators are once again attempting to advance a bill that would expand testing for toxic PFAS in known discharges into lakes, rivers, and groundwater reserves across the state — a proposed requirement magnified by the state’s latest study of rural soils, which found these “forever chemicals” in 97 percent of samples.
Senate Bill 4574 — the PFAS Discharge Disclosure Act, introduced by Sen. Rachel May — would require all entities currently holding wastewater discharge permits to monitor for PFAS and disclose the results.
As it stands today, the Department of Environmental Conservation’s permitting guidance “has only applied limits and PFAS testing requirements to a subset of facilities, meaning that many potential sources of PFAS directly or indirectly discharging into the waters of the state, including industrial sources sending waste to Publicly Owned Treatment Works, have not yet been required to test for PFAS,” according to the bill’s text.
The bill passed unanimously out of the Senate last April, but sat idle for eight months in the New York Assembly before dying in January. It was subsequently returned to the Senate.
This week, in the Senate Committee on Environmental Conservation’s first meeting of 2026, lawmakers swiftly moved to place the bill back on the Senate floor for a vote. If it passes again, SB 4574 will return once more to the Assembly.
“For too long, the public has been unaware of the extent of PFAS released by industrial polluters into our lakes, rivers, and groundwater,” said Sen. May in a statement. “This bill provides transparency by requiring monitoring data from industrial permit holders, including landfills and Publicly Owned Treatment Works (POTWs) that manage wastewater. This information will be crucial in limiting and ultimately eliminating this threat to public health.”
Environmental groups, including Environmental Advocates New York, have voiced their support for the bill.
The PFAS Discharge Disclosure Act isn’t the only piece of freshwater legislation to lose the momentum it had gained early in 2025. Senate Bill 1211, also known as the New York Open Water Data Act, passed unanimously out of both the Senate and Assembly last spring, before being vetoed in December by Gov. Kathy Hochul.
Had it become law, SB 1211 would have required the state’s water-related agencies “to collaborate on making critical water data available to the public, ensuring that water resources are managed more efficiently and giving water users access to the data they need to make informed decisions,” according to the bill’s text.
In the News
Dueling Data Center Bills: Two bills in the Wisconsin Legislature are aiming to mandate greater transparency from data centers regarding their water and electricity needs, though with different energy-use requirements.
Last week’s edition of Fresh detailed Senate Bill 729, introduced in December by Wisconsin Democrats. Among other water and energy reporting mandates, the bill would require at least 70 percent of a data center’s electricity to come from renewable sources, in order for the facility to qualify for sales and use tax exemptions.
Last week, state Republicans introduced dueling legislation in the form of Assembly Bill 840. The bill would require data centers to use “closed-loop” cooling systems on-site to conserve water, and order utilities to ensure that regular customers do not foot the bill for the construction of new energy infrastructure built to serve these campuses. But it would also require all renewable energy sources serving the data center to be built on-site.
Policy experts are pessimistic that either bill will receive enough support to become law.
“We want data centers to use renewable energy, and companies I’m aware of prefer that,” Beata Wierzba, a government affairs director for the non-profit Renew Wisconsin, tells Canary Media. “The way the Republican bill addresses that is negative and would deter that possibility. But the Democratic bill almost goes too far — 70%. That’s a prescribed amount, too much of a hook and not enough carrot.”
Natural Gas: Amid a new era of energy transition and demands within the Great Lakes region, the Michigan House has passed a bill that aims to protect the future of natural gas infrastructure and development in the state. According to House Bill 4486, which will now head to the Senate Committee on Energy and Environment, no municipality is allowed to impose a ban on the usage or installation of natural gas or propane infrastructure.
According to the most recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 45 percent of the electricity generated in Michigan in 2024 came from natural-gas plants. The need for electricity is expected only to grow with the arrival of data centers. By 2040, 7.8 percent of the state’s electricity will be used to power these facilities alone, according to a recent report from the University of Virginia’s Cooper Center for Public Service.
“Families shouldn’t be forced into higher costs because of one-size-fits-all mandates,” said Rep. Joe Pavlov (R–Smiths Creek), who co-sponsored the bill, in a statement. “This bill ensures people, not politicians, decide what energy sources and appliances work best for their homes and businesses.”
Looking Ahead
Dry Cleaning: A bill introduced in the Michigan House last week would place a ban on the manufacturing, sale, and use of dry cleaning solvent that contains perchloroethylene, a chemical that is “likely to be carcinogenic in humans by all routes of exposure,” according to the U.S. EPA, and which the agency has targeted with a 10-year phaseout plan.
Perchloroethylene has been a primary contaminant at a number of Superfund sites across Michigan, including the Wash King Laundry site in Baldwin, G&H Landfill in Utica, and the Charlevoix Municipal Well in Charlevoix, all of which are still actively being cleaned.
House Bill 5454, if passed, would place the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy in charge of enforcing the ban and allocating funds to help dry cleaning businesses transition to other chemicals.
You can find more stories from the Great Lakes region here.
Your support powers independent journalism on water. From the Great Lakes to global crises, Circle of Blue delivers trusted reporting that informs communities and decision-makers. Help us continue this work—every gift makes a difference.
