Robert Wendelgass is Deputy Director for Clean Water Action, helping to direct the organization’s field offices around the country. He was Pennsylvania State Director for Clean Water Action for sixteen years, coordinating Clean Water Action’s campaigns to protect Pennsylvania’s rivers, streams and watersheds, to strengthen standards protecting drinking water, and to reduce toxic exposure and contamination.

Under his leadership, Clean Water Action organized a coalition of parents, teachers and public health activists that won passage of landmark legislation protecting children from pesticide use in public schools. Mr. Wendelgass helped form and chairs the Pennsylvania Campaign for Clean Water, a coalition of over 140 state, regional and local watershed groups that has helped dramatically improve state rules governing the management of stormwater and increasing protection for wetlands in the state. Clean Water Action has led or participated in numerous campaigns to protect the health of the state’s environment and residents, including the recent campaign to tighten standards for mercury emissions from power plants. Mr. Wendelgass also oversaw Clean Water Action’s local organizing work which has secured improvements at Sunoco’s South Philadelphia refinery, tightened standards for discharges into various local waterways.

Wendelgass serves as a member of the Department of Environmental Protection’s Water Resources Advisory Committee and the Delaware Basin Water Resources Committee; was a member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council’s Small Systems Working Group; and served on the Implementation Advisory Committee helping the Delaware River Basin Commission develop strategies to reduce PCBs in the Delaware basin.

Wendelgass has been involved in community organizing and various social change organizations for over thirty years. He began work during his college years for a multi-issue social justice organization in Rochester NY, fighting bank redlining and opposing plans for a nuclear power plant in the area. He directed a neighborhood organization that worked in a multi-racial low and moderate community in Rochester, helping improve housing conditions and secure new investments by area financial institutions. He also directed the Philadelphia-based Action Alliance of Senior Citizens for eleven years, helping organize statewide campaigns establishing programs to subsidize prescription costs for the elderly and contain out-of-pocket expenses for medical care for seniors.

Wendelgass has a BA from Syracuse University, with dual majors in Urban Studies and Economics.