HARRISBURG, Pa. — A Berks County Republican who wants Lake Erie renamed “Lake Pennsylvania” filed the paperwork Wednesday morning. As of Thursday, that paperwork is all there is.
Rep. David Maloney, R-130th Dist., of Boyertown, circulated a co-sponsorship memo at 11:05 a.m. Sept. 9 telling House colleagues he will introduce a resolution urging the president, Congress and the interior secretary to rename the lake. The General Assembly’s own page for the memo carries a one-line status: “This document has not been submitted for introduction yet.”
That means there is no bill number, no committee referral, no hearing date and no public list of co-sponsors. No member from Lehigh, Northampton or Carbon County has signed on, because nothing has been filed for anyone to sign.
Maloney had made the case publicly a day earlier, posting a release to his X account Sept. 8 that said Pennsylvania “has only one Great Lake and maybe it is time we put our name on it.”
Even fully passed, a House resolution of this kind urges. It does not rename. Federal name changes run through the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which holds the legal responsibility for standardizing names across the federal government and maintains the Geographic Names Information System.
The working example is two weeks old. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Aug. 27 renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” directing the interior secretary to act “in coordination with the Board on Geographic Names” within 30 days and to remove all references to Lake Ontario from the database. The Environmental Protection Agency’s Great Lakes statistics table now carries the lake as Lake America.
What followed is the template for a shared lake. Google said in a blog post it had changed the name in Maps for users in the United States, while users in Canada still see Lake Ontario and users elsewhere see both. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a video her state would not use the new name, and Ontario Premier Doug Ford unveiled a billboard on the Canadian shore reading “Lake Ontario — Now and Always.”
Erie is bounded by Ontario to the north and by Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and New York.
Maloney’s memo rests its case on use rather than history. “Every summer, Pennsylvanians head toward the lake—north on I-79 from western Pennsylvania, west on I-80 from central and eastern Pennsylvania,” it reads. It credits the state with stocking nearly 500,000 yearling steelhead in 2025, about 40 percent of all steelhead stocked in the lake, and all of the brown trout.
The memo concedes the geography: Pennsylvania has “a relatively small share of the lake’s shoreline.” The Fish and Boat Commission’s boating handbook puts it at 63 miles, with 735 square miles of lake water inside state boundaries. The Department of Environmental Protection’s coastal program says 77 miles, a figure that includes major tributaries. Against the EPA’s totals — 871 miles of shoreline including islands and 9,910 square miles of water — the commission’s numbers put Pennsylvania’s share at roughly 7 percent either way. Maloney lives more than 350 miles from Erie, PennLive reported.
The idea began as a joke. Maloney, the ranking Republican on the House Game and Fisheries Committee, told a joint committee meeting at the Erie Maritime Museum on Sept. 2 that testimony about fishing and tourism had made his argument for him. “I think all of you made the argument for renaming it ‘Lake of PA,'” he said, six days after the Lake Ontario order. The Erie Times-News reported it drew laughter.
Erie County Executive Christina Vogel said in a statement to PennLive that the county does not want the name changed. “Lake Erie’s name reflects the layers of our history, from the Indigenous Erie people to the pivotal role our region played in the War of 1812,” Vogel said.
No Erie-area legislator and no House leader had commented publicly on the memo as of Thursday afternoon.