Iowa’s environment takes hits on the legislative back burner

While the Republican-controlled Legislature has grabbed headlines handing out more gifts to the religious right than can be found at your local Hobby Lobby, the condition of God’s green earth in Iowa has been taking some hits.

Iowa’s environment is on the back burner again amid all this fire and brimstone. Still, harmful bills remain alive as lawmakers enter the home stretch.

But this past week, a bad bill, remarkably, died Under the Golden Dome of Wisdom. It’s a miracle.

The bill, Senate Fill 516, would have required the Department of Natural Resources to focus on the maintenance of existing public lands, rather than acquiring new land to expand or create new public opens spaces. Opponents of the bill, including environmental protection and outdoor recreation proponents, saw the bill as an effort to discourage the creation of new parks, trails and conservation areas. They’re right.

Iowa ranks among states with the smallest percentage of public lands, with roughly 3 percent of the state publicly owned. Compare that the more than 30 million acres of cropland in this 36-million-acre state. Half of the public lands in Iowa are road rights of way, such as interstate medians.

But farm groups say that’s still too much, claiming farmers are being outbid for land by governments and groups that want to conserve the land for various public uses.

Of course, curtailing the expansion of public lands and the conservation benefits they offer is bad for Iowa’s environment. More farming means more dirty water, for example. But that’s not a problem for our current Statehouse leadership. Never has been.

Backers of the bill also claimed the DNR can’t afford to maintain the land it has. Not surprising, considering how the Legislature has been lowballing DNR funding for years. They’ve hobbled the department and now criticize it for limping. Neat trick.

Fortunately, HF 516 failed to receive consideration in the House State Government Committee ahead of a legislative funnel deadline. So it’s considered dead for the rest of the session. Next year, who knows?

To the groups who backed the bill, including the Iowa Farm Bureau, which has been on a crusade to stop public land expansion, I offer thoughts and prayers.

But we’re still not out of the woods yet.

Another bill, Senate File 548, repeals a property tax exemption for landowners with fruit tree or forest reserves on their property. By 2025, under the bill, only 50 percent of the value of forested land would be property tax exempt. The Legislative Services Agency say the bill will result in an $8.3 million property tax increase for those landowners by Fiscal Year 2027.

And here we thought Republicans were determined to cut property taxes. Sure, but not for a bunch of tree-huggers.

Why would the Legislature want to target forest land? Well, it’s the same thinking that went into the bill limiting public lands. Some forest reserve landowners might bristle at the idea of paying more taxes and convert the land to an agricultural use or sell it to someone who will. So maybe Iowa gets more farmland or grazing land. Just what we need.

“If you go ahead and tax these, even at 50 percent, over 40 years you won’t have any economic gain,” said Paul Millice, a board member of the Iowa Woodland Owners Association who has six acres of timber south of Iowa City, according to reporting by The Gazette’s Erin Murphy. “It will cause some landowners to throw in the towel. It will have a profound effect on water quality and runoff and all these other things.”

This shady tree tax remains very much alive as the Legislature comes down the home stretch.

So does the bill I wrote about last weekend that would prohibit local ordinances directing builders to restore some topsoil they scrape from construction sites. The measure also sets a low bar for stormwater regulations governing new developments. Both pieces would harm water quality, worsen flooding risks and potentially overwhelm existing stormwater infrastructure.

But, as usual, those consequences are no match for the political clout of homebuilders, real estate interests, earthmoving companies and other GOP business pals.

Last but not least is Gov. Kim Reynolds’ Executive Order 10, which she signed back in January. The order directs state departments, boards and commissions to stop all new rule making and review, rewrite or repeal all rules currently on the books. The goal is to look for “obsolete, ineffective, excessively burdensome or redundant” rules that should be repealed.

Sounds reasonable. Except for the fact that state environmental regulations already are exceedingly weak. Does anyone believe this rules review will lead to stronger rules governing water pollution? It’s more likely the revised rules will be even less “burdensome” so Reynolds can please her big business and agriculture donors at the expense of our natural resources.

Reynolds’ order came just as the DNR was revising its rules governing animal feeding operations. The department, according to the Iowa Environmental Council, has pledged to make those rules a priority this year as part of its broader review process.

The Environmental Council and a coalition of 14 other groups have asked the DNR to make changes to the AFO rules, including closing loopholes allowing some feeding operations to avoid state regulations, creating a process for stopping projects in environmentally high-risk areas, placing lower limits on manure application on crops and adopting stronger water quality rules for facilities built on porous Karst terrain.

Those would be good changes, to be sure. But will Reynolds’ drive to slash regulations leave room for some actual environmental wins? God only knows.

(319) 398-8262; todd.dorman@thegazette.com