116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Pony up for clean water
Good ideas for improving Iowa’s water quality have been ignored by state lawmakers and Big Ag allies.
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The Iowa General Assembly is no place for public policy geeks. Legislative leaders from “both sides of the aisle” taught me so during my 16 years in the Iowa House of Representatives.
I can count on one hand the number of bills or amendments I sponsored that were adopted or even discussed in committee or on the House floor. In one case, a simple word fix was rejected, causing an entire program to be delayed for a year.
Polls routinely show significant majorities of Iowans are willing to pay more for clean water. Water quality is a priority for most Iowans, but not for the Iowa Legislature. The Nutrient Reduction Strategy was created by the secretary of agriculture in a process that excluded legislators. The “strategy” — a menu of voluntary practices, really — has been adopted into Iowa Code but has never been debated.
This year Republicans abolished the Watershed Planning Advisory Council (WPAC) and continue to attack Iowa’s 29 watershed management authorities (WMAs), the only public entities that Big Ag doesn’t (yet) control, directly or indirectly.
The WPAC was the only state body of diverse voices to openly discuss water policy, including environmental, conservation and agricultural groups. Legislative leaders never heeded their recommendations and rarely invited the WPAC to make presentations.
WMAs cross political boundaries by including cities, counties and soil/water districts in specific watersheds. Every year, Republicans attack their name, their makeup and their limited powers.
WMAs have never received direct state appropriations, although they can apply for some state grants. Last year, the Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship advocated a bill dictating how WMAs could use private and non-state public moneys. Even the bill manager I worked with thought the move was illegal. House File 2642 bit the dust, at least for that session.
I am not the only legislator who offers proposals to address Iowa’s water issues, but I probably do hold the record for most. I am a disciple of the late state Rep. Paul Johnson (father of the Groundwater Protection Act of 1987), and former state Rep. Donovan Olson, who chaired the House Environmental Protection Committee when I arrived in 2010. Olson’s motto: “Good policy is good politics.” Not many think that way anymore.
Sometimes we legislators mistake the sides of our ruts for the horizon. Weeds grow in ruts. As I climb out of mine, I share a few proposals that I and a few colleagues offered that went nowhere at the time but could grow on Iowa if planted on more fertile ground — that is, if legislators are finally willing to talk turkey and pony up. From the simple to the complex, here are a baker’s dozen:
- Require farmland leases to have written conservation provisions agreed to by landowner and tenant.
- Obligate drinking water utilities to create source water protection plans.
- Before a property can be sold, require on-site private drinking water wells to be tested for nitrates, e-coli, PFAS and other contaminants, with results disclosed to buyers.
- Create a soil and water conservation major at Iowa State University (what, you mean that’s not a thing already?).
- Ban the farmland application of sewage sludge and other materials contaminated with PFAS chemicals.
- Set up a permanent legislative water resources committee that actually meets (if public universities need more scrutiny, then surely our state water policies do).
- Test water supply systems for lead and copper if they serve child care facilities or schools.
- Require industries seeking water withdrawal permits to show their uses will cause no degradation of groundwater or surface water quantity or quality.
- Review and update the state’s 22-year-old “master matrix” for the siting of animal feeding operations.
- Permit counties to adopt and administer stream buffer ordinances.
- Impose a stream user fee on manure management plans and the sale of nitrogen-based fertilizer to supplement or replace public moneys used for water quality projects.
- Create a state Clean Water Commission modeled on the Transportation Commission and road use fund. Moneys could come from a combination of state dollars (IWiLL?) and new water quality checkoffs approved by ag commodity groups. Producers can collectively show their commitment to natural resource conservation, since “we all want clean water.” Through a “land and water use fund,” everyone who uses soil and water covers the costs of “maintaining the infrastructure.”
- Books have been written: Adopt meaningful, ambitious strategies to help farmers access the land, capital and technical assistance they need to grow food for human consumption in ways that benefit soil and water. “Setting the Table for All Iowans,” a plan from the Iowa Food Systems Coalition, would be a good start, and not just for policy geeks.
On Jan. 12, Chuck Isenhart of Dubuque ends his run in the Iowa House of Representatives, where he served as a member of the Agriculture Committee, ranking member on the Environmental Protection Committee, and ranking member on the Agriculture, Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Appropriations Subcommittee. He continues to work as Iowa Public Policy Geek on Substack: https://chuckisenhart.substack.com/about.
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