York County says USGS monitoring shows lower sediment, nitrogen and phosphorus levels than 2019 DEP report

York County officials announced on Earth Day that four years of continuous monitoring conducted with the United States Geological Survey show county waterways carry substantially lower levels of sediment, nitrogen and phosphorus than a 2019 Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection report indicated.

County Commission President Commissioner Wheeler made the announcement at a news event on Fishing Creek in Goldsboro, Newberry Township, and credited a county–USGS partnership that established six monitoring stations along the county's eastern boundary.

The monitoring system, the county said, records measurements every 15 minutes at each station and has produced a four‑year dataset the county used to compare with DEP's 2019 modeled estimates. "That's 96 data points every day, 365 days a year," Wade Gohbrecht, director of the York County Planning Commission, said as he described the monitoring cadence and the results.

Gohbrecht presented the county's four‑year averages alongside DEP's 2019 modeled figures. According to the county: the 2019 DEP…