March 11, 2025
Chicago – Nancy Stoner joined the Environmental Law & Policy Center today as a Senior Attorney focusing on the Clean Water program in our Washington, D.C., office. Nancy’s career has been devoted to protecting clean water. During the Obama administration, she served as the U.S. EPA’s Acting Assistant Administrator where she managed the agency’s national program for implementing the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act.
Nancy most recently was President of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network. Before that, she was a senior program officer at the Pisces Foundation in San Francisco, leading the clean water program. In the years prior to her tenure at U.S. EPA, Nancy worked at the Natural Resources Defense Council as Co-Director of the Water Program where she focused on federal water policy and cleaning up the Anacostia River, and she was a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division.
“I am pleased that Nancy Stoner will be joining ELPC’s team of talented Clean Water public interest attorneys and policy advocates,” said Howard Learner, ELPC’s Executive Director. “Nancy comes to ELPC as one of the top Clean Water Act legal and policy experts in the country. She will be especially helpful at this time when ELPC is challenging the Trump administration’s misguided rollbacks of vital environmental protections and seeking to advance innovative safe clean water solutions in the Great Lakes states.”
In 2014, during Nancy’s tenure at U.S. EPA, toxic algal blooms in western Lake Erie infiltrated the Toledo, Ohio’s drinking water intake and close to half a million people were forbidden to drink or use their tap water for 72 hours. ELPC has led the charge with other groups in multiple lawsuits against the EPA since then for allegedly failing to control pollution entering the western basin from industrial agriculture, which is believed to be the major cause behind the dangerous algal blooms.
“I am delighted to join ELPC’s team of highly effective attorneys in working to protect the iconic water resources of the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi River basin,” Nancy Stoner said. “While the challenges are great, so is the support of the public for stronger protections for our lakes and rivers. We have great opportunities before us.”