Posted tagged ‘water quality’

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Talk is cheap

November 20, 2012
David Osterberg

David Osterberg

There are three principal problems with the Governor’s proposed Nutrient Reduction Strategy, and they can be summed up in three words: Talk is cheap.

Solutions to this problem start with enforcement, and that takes money. The state of Iowa shortchanges water quality, underfunding it even compared to what we did a decade ago. Our March 2012 report, Drops in the Bucket: The Erosion of Iowa Water Quality Funding, found that this water-quality funding decline came despite greater needs for water protection and public willingness to fund it.

Second, inadequate enforcement of environmental rules for Iowa’s livestock industry has resulted in the state’s censure by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and this threatens our ability to write permits and otherwise enforce our obligations under the Clean Water Act. The strategy bases enforcement on voluntary acceptance of state rules. This has not worked.

Finally, it says much about Iowa’s commitment to water quality — or lack of commitment — when the state proposes a major nutrient reduction strategy and offers no new money to get the job done. The strategy proposes nothing to make sure Iowa does better in assuring clean water for its residents, for states downstream, and the future.

In short, we need a strategy that recognizes the serious water quality problem we have and offers a realistic approach to addressing it. This must be more than a goal — but a guarantee to all Iowans.

Posted by David Osterberg, Executive Director

Categories: Budget and Tax, Energy & Environment, Organization
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Does Iowa have the will to govern itself?

November 13, 2012

Does Iowa have the will to govern itself?

How ironic that we have reason to ask that question, a week after a presidential election that capped three-plus years of courting of Iowa voters, and a few days before a potential 2016 candidate visits to start all of it brewing again.

Yet the question is unavoidable. Consider two pieces in today’s Des Moines Register.

First, the Register reports, the federal Environmental Protection Agency may take over water quality enforcement in Iowa due to weak efforts by Iowa’s state Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

As IPP’s David Osterberg recently told EPA officials to hold DNR more accountable because the state is underfunding water protection.

“EPA should help the agency in bargaining with a legislature that has shown itself to be less concerned with water quality protection than tax cuts. … There is no question that if EPA simply accepts the agency’s agreement to try to do better, water quality will not improve in this state.”

If the EPA admonishment of Iowa’s lax environmental enforcement were not enough, we also are waiting for the state to offer its long-overdue decision on how to proceed on health reform. The 2012 election affirms the Affordable Care Act will not be repealed, so the state’s dragging its heels on creating a health insurance exchange no longer makes sense — if it ever did.

Yet, we now have a real question of whether it’s a good idea for the state to move ahead on its own with an exchange, where Iowans can shop for affordable insurance and not be denied coverage, or having the federal government do it for us. As the Register opined in an editorial today, “It is too important for this state to mess up.” Citing problems implementing temporary high-risk pools, and political dealings in previous legislative attempts to create an exchange, the Register noted:

“Iowans need the coming insurance marketplace to work for them in years to come. But state leaders have shown they are not the ones to design it.”

Can we govern ourselves? Apparently national candidates will come calling in Iowa without worrying about that. So maybe we should answer if for ourselves.

Posted by Mike Owen, Assistant Director

Categories: Budget and Tax, Economic Opportunity, Energy & Environment, Organization
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IPP to EPA: Hold DNR Accountable on Water Quality

October 18, 2012

Tonight (October 18) in Des Moines, Environmental Protection Agency Region 7 Administrator Karl Brooks will meet with Iowans to hear comments and concerns about a new work plan by the state Department of Environmental Resources to bring Iowa into compliance with the Clean Water Act.

Below is a letter outlining remarks prepared by IPP Executive Director David Osterberg for tonight’s meeting.

The meeting is at the State Historical Building, 600 East Locust Street, Des Moines, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

——————————

Oct. 17, 2012

Stephen Pollard, Water Enforcement Branch
United States Environmental Protection Agency, Region 7
11201 Renner Blvd
Lenexa, KS 66219

RE: Public comments on Iowa DNR’s response to EPA’s Water Quality findings

Dear Mr. Pollard:

The Iowa Policy Project is a nonprofit research organization located in Iowa City. We wish to make the following comments about the response by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources to your report of inadequacies in the state NPDES program. We limit our remarks to the question of staffing and funding the agency.

  1. The DNR acknowledged that it has given less attention to water quality problems caused by animal feeding operations — see quote below:

“Since 2007, the DNR has had a significant reduction in its animal feeding operations staff. To better meet our responsibilities, the DNR needs both an increase in staffing and to reprioritize workloads.”

While the DNR did not explain to you the extent of the deep reduction in agency field staff they have answered elsewhere.

From a DNR 2011 report on manure on frozen and snow covered ground:

“The scope and complexity of confinement program work increased disproportionately beginning with legislation in the late ’90s. With this, public awareness of environmental issues also grew, resulting in a significant increase in local demand for education, compliance assistance and compliance assurance. To address these needs, animal feeding operations field staffing gradually increased to a high of 23 by SFY 2004. In SFY 2008, four staff people were shifted into a newly established open feedlots program. Then in the fall of 2009, as General Fund expenditures declined, confinement staffing was reduced again. This reduced staff numbers from 19 to 11.5. Further reductions leave the total of field staff for confinement work at 8.75 full time equivalents. This reduction means that the DNR will not be able to maintain an adequate level of compliance and enforcement activity in confinements.”

Thus the 2011 DNR report demonstrates that the envisioned 13 staff-person increase would only bring numbers back to approximately the 2004 staffing levels — before the addition of many more confinement operations.

  1. Underfunding of water quality programs is not limited to animal agriculture. An IPP report from March 2012 demonstrated an overall decrease in water quality funding of $5 million over the decade. Drops in the Bucket: The Erosion of Iowa Water Quality Funding found that this water-quality funding decline came despite greater needs for water protection and public willingness to fund it.
    http://www.iowapolicyproject.org/2012docs/120301-water.pdf
  1. Given this underfunding by the Iowa Legislature, there appears to be no basis for the agency’s belief that it will get approval for 13 more staff members. First, the request must be made in the Governor’s proposed budget that will be drawn up in January of next year. Second, the Legislature must agree to this increase without endangering other water quality programs.
  1. EPA should help the agency in bargaining with a legislature that has shown itself to be less concerned with water quality protection than tax cuts. EPA should tell the DNR that if it fails to get a proposed increase in staff in the Governor’s budget and also to have the request authorized by the General Assembly, there will be consequences. These must be severe consequences commensurate with the funding being sought — that is, EPA should establish a minimum number of staff additions that will be required. Absent that it should state that it will withdraw the authorized NPDES program from DNR. There is no question that if EPA simply accepts the agency’s agreement to try to do better, water quality will not improve in this state.

Thank you for your attention to improving the quality of water in our state.

Sincerely,

David Osterberg, Executive Director, The Iowa Policy Project

Categories: Energy & Environment, Organization
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Policy and pollution: We have options

July 19, 2012

Iowa’s deteriorating water quality is a lingering problem that never seems to make it to the front burner of political campaigns or elected leaders’ agendas in the State Capitol. The Des Moines Register’s editorial today asks — and answers — the fundamental questions:

Why is our water so dirty? The state’s agricultural businesses, including 7,000 animal feeding operations, is a significant reason. Why do they do so much damage to the environment? Elected officials let them.

David Osterberg

David Osterberg

It’s not like we don’t have options. We do. Public policy can make a difference in protecting the environment, through tough and effective regulations that recognize the air and water belong to all of us, and by helping folks do a better job with targeted incentives.

Unfortunately, as the Register suggests, elected officials in Iowa have passed up opportunities in both the regulatory and incentive arenas to enhance Iowa’s water quality. The Iowa Policy Project through the years has noted many of the issues and presented constructive policy options. Here is a selection of those reports:

IPP also showed this year how environmental protection funding has waned in Iowa — even when voters specifically told lawmakers with a referendum in 2010 that environmental protection is an area where they want to see funding directed. As we found:

While legislators and other elected officials will always proclaim their commitment to clean water, they have not over the past decade demonstrated that commitment through the state budget. In fact, once inflation is taken into account, funding for many programs the state relies upon to monitor, protect and improve waterways has dropped by 25 percent or more. …

Over time, this slow erosion in the purchasing power of these programs is likely to contribute to deteriorating Iowa water quality, if it has not already done so. When funding is scaled to FY13 appropriations, the slow decline in spending on water programs becomes more evident.

Posted by David Osterberg, Executive Director

Categories: Budget and Tax, Energy & Environment, Organization
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Small boost in funding masks long-term reductions in state services

June 26, 2012
David Osterberg

David Osterberg

July 1 begins the new fiscal year for the state of Iowa so this is a good time for IPP staffers to update reports released during the legislative session.

Two areas of funding that generally get lip service support from our elected officials are higher education funding and funding for water quality programs. In both areas there was some increase over the very low levels of funding from the previous year. Yet the long-term erosion of funding in these areas of state services was not improved a great deal.

While funding for ISU, UNI and the University of Iowa was increased this year by about $20 million, funding for these institutions still remains about 40 percent below what it was in fiscal year 2000 when inflation is taken into account. Andrew Cannon’s earlier report showed that long term underfunding is the reason that tuition has increased so much over the last decade. Community colleges seem to have fared better with only a 15 percent reduction in funding in real terms over the same period but enrollment has increased, so actual support for students is lower than that.

Water quality received some funding increases in two of the eight individual programs reviewed by Will Hoyer in his March 2012 report. However, overall funding for this group of water quality programs has fallen from what it was 10 years ago.

Lower funding in areas Iowans strongly support are the consequence of continual tax cuts that reduce the size of the state budget in relation to the size of the Iowa economy.

Posted by David Osterberg, Executive Director

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Tax-cutters’ unbalanced focus undermines self-government

March 20, 2012
David Osterberg

David Osterberg

Cut taxes, starve schools. Cut taxes, starve environmental protection. Cut taxes, … well, I think you’re getting the idea.

“The-tax-cuts-are-my-only-priority” legislators now have enough power to keep eroding our ability to meet our needs.

As I pointed out Sunday in a guest opinion in The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, this drive to underfund education is the root of recent decisions to close Polk Elementary School in Cedar Rapids and the Price Lab School at the University of Northern Iowa.

What we have in Des Moines is a leadership problem and a governing problem. Leaders find a way of matching revenues to our needs. The rejection of this kind of responsibility by a large enough number of our elected officials is the problem.

And the facts — as we have demonstrated in Iowa Policy Project reports — are clear. Most recently, we showed Iowa’s decline in support for the regents’ universities over the last 10 years. For the University of Iowa alone, it meant 40 percent less in actual spending power than the state provided in 2000, and a shift of costs to tuition-paying students and their parents.

A week before, we showed similar results with water-quality funding.

Even now, there is no greater cry than to cut commercial property taxes — even when most of the cuts would go to firms like WalMart and McDonald’s. It doesn’t matter. It’s a tax cut, period.

Ironically, even those who some elected officials are attempting to appeal to need the services they are cutting. Rockwell Collins needs trained engineers, and can better retain employees when rivers are clean and people have places to recreate.

Voters who want their kids educated and their rivers clean need to recognize that it doesn’t happen without state funding. More tax cuts don’t get us there.

Posted by David Osterberg, Executive Director

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Will Iowa ever put taxpayers’ dollars where their voices are?

March 6, 2012
Mike Owen

Mike Owen

The Des Moines Register editorial staff has produced some excellent perspectives about budgets in recent days, about budget cutting run amok, and budget cuts affecting the courts and human services (including accountability and oversight). Noted The Register:

It’s unlikely you will hear a politician say state government is too small. But at some point, it is.

You could certainly make the same case about environmental quality programs, particularly in water quality, as we showed in a report last week. In Drops in the Bucket: The Erosion of Iowa Water Quality Funding, IPP’s Will Hoyer, Brian McDonough and David Osterberg noted:

In a state with almost 90 percent of its land worked for agriculture, it should be of stark concern to Iowa policy makers that the water running through both our agricultural lands and urban landscapes contains excess nutrients, toxic chemicals, and sediments. These pollutants end up in Iowa’s rivers and streams. The impacts upon public health, fishing and other recreational activities, and cleanup and water treatment costs show up not just in Iowa, but all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. There, the nutrients from cornbelt farm fields are creating the area of hypoxic (low oxygen) conditions known as the “Dead Zone,” where sea life cannot live. …
 
Iowa voters demonstrated strongly that they favor additional efforts to protect Iowa waterways when 63 percent voted in 2010 to approve the Water and Land Legacy amendment, so one might expect the state to increase its commitment to protecting its water. While funding by itself is not an indicator of performance, it is a necessary ingredient in the fight to protect and improve Iowa’s water resources. This report looks at funding for several key state water programs over the last decade and finds that, from a fiscal perspective, the state’s commitment to water protection programs is woefully lacking. (emphasis added)

Among the IPP analysts’ findings is that for most of the period from FY2002-12, inflation-adjusted totals for 10 critical water programs hovered at just over $20 million, and that there were significant drops from those funding levels in FY03 and FY11, with little rebound from the latter in FY12. See the figure below (Figure 3 in our report).

Recent Drop in Water Quality Funding in Critical Programs
Figures in thousands
Table1

At the same time of these funding trends, we have learned that more and more waters in Iowa were impaired. One might expect greater awareness to produce greater attention to remediation, but clearly we are not seeing it. In fact, the Legislature would have to restore $5 million in state water-quality funding just to move to what it had been during the previous decade — as if those earlier levels were enough, something that is not self-evident.

The only thing that is self-evident is that Iowa lawmakers are not putting taxpayers’ money where their voices are: toward more and better water-quality initiatives.

Posted by Mike Owen, Assistant Director

Categories: Budget and Tax, Energy & Environment, Organization
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Drops in the bucket: an erosion of water quality funding

March 2, 2012
Will Hoyer

Will Hoyer

Lawmakers in Des Moines working on the state budget should remember that 63 percent of Iowans approved of a constitutional amendment creating a new fund for natural resources and water quality in the state.  And now there is new evidence that that funding is needed.

In our March 1st report, Drops in the Bucket: The Erosion of Iowa Water Quality Funding, we show that overall water quality funding in the state has dwindled over the past decade and it would take at least $5 million in next year’s budget just to get us back to an average funding level for the past decade.  This begs the question of whether those average levels were adequate or not.

The 10 water quality programs we looked at most saw significant declines of around 30 percent when adjusted for inflation.  These programs provide a good snapshot of overall water quality funding in the state.

Table 3 from IPP report

When adjusted for inflation most of these programs saw significant decreases; the average inflation-adjusted decrease for these seven budget items is over 30 percent.

Numbers can sometimes be deceiving and in some cases look better than they really are.  The water monitoring program of the DNR, for instance, has maintained nominal funding of about $2.9 million for nine straight years. Because of shifting money within the department, however, the monitoring program is not able to monitor things like groundwater quality, or test for pesticides and pharmaceuticals like it used to.

Money is not the only factor in improving Iowa water quality, but it is a necessary part of any effort.  Iowa’s water quality can be improved.  For evidence, just look at trout streams in northeast Iowa, which have made dramatic improvements since the mid-1980s, with six or seven times more streams having naturally reproducing trout now.

Improvements like that won’t  happen without funding and the state’s current investment in water quality is not going to be adequate to make a significant improvement across the state. If these trends continue where will be in another 10 years?  At what point do we say, “Enough is enough,” and start making the investment in our natural resources?

Posted by Will Hoyer, Research Associate

———

Read new IPP report by Will Hoyer, Brian McDonough and David Osterberg

See Radio Iowa and Cedar Rapids Gazette stories about the report

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More drainage and water quality benefits, too? Maybe

June 22, 2011
Will Hoyer

Will Hoyer

We’ve all heard about the area of hypoxia, or the so-called “Dead Zone,” in the Gulf of Mexico. As a result of all the rain and flooding this year and the amount of water flowing down the Mississippi, scientists are expecting the Dead Zone to be the largest ever recorded.

It’s starting to appear that these rain events are becoming the “new normal” just as climate modelers have predicted. Therefore it is becoming even more imperative that we take steps to reduce the amount of nutrients that are leaving Iowa fields and keep them from flowing downstream. The Wetland and Drainage Initiative that we write about in our latest report is an attempt by the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship (IDALS) to study one potential way for doing just that.

At the heart of it the concept behind the Initiative, which some know as “the Iowa Plan,” is the idea that enlarging the subsurface drainage(or “tile”) capacity will allow fields to dry faster thus increasing crop yields. The additional profits from the higher yields could then pay for the construction of nitrate removal wetlands that would be built at the outlets of the tiles. The larger tile capacity would mean more nitrate leaving the fields but the nitrates would be removed by the wetlands. That’s the theory — but it needs to be tested. That’s what IDALS is doing, in partnership with other agencies and groups, at several sites in north central Iowa.

map showing Des Moines Lobe

The Des Moines Lobe is the focus of the IDALS initiative.

We really don’t know for sure if this Initiative will work as touted and there are lots of questions, questions that hopefully will be answered with rigorous, transparent monitoring of the pilot sites. Rightly or wrongly there is a lot of skepticism among some groups regarding anything IDALS does and so the onus is on IDALS to demonstrate that these pilot projects, were they to be expanded across the tile-drained parts of the state, would actually have water quality and crop yield benefits and would not have unintended negative consequences.

A lot of research underlies the Initiative, and with thorough monitoring of the pilot sites scientists will probably know a lot more in five years. It’s possible that these treatment wetlands will be playing a much bigger role in the next few decades in Iowa, Illinois and other tile drained parts of the country, but in five years the data may also show that the concept just does not work. We’ll see.

  • We should avoid a situation where farmers are putting in larger tiles with no way of removing the extra nitrogen and therefore contributing even more to downstream water problems.
  • We should avoid subsidizing farmers’ installations of larger tiles.
  • We should avoid draining the few remaining wetlands we have left.
  • We should avoid putting scarce public dollars into programs that may not have benefits.
  • We also should avoid putting all of our eggs in one basket. It’s going to take more than just these nitrate removal wetlands to get Iowa water quality to where it needs to be and there are lots of other steps that can be taken and existing programs that could use more resources in the meantime.

In short, this is a message to catch our breath and let the research tell us what’s happening. This Initiative combining enhanced drainage and nitrate-removal wetlands shows promise to benefit both farmers and water quality but until we see the numbers in a few years we will withhold judgment.

By Will Hoyer, Research Associate

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Hiding behind averages — soil erosion problems in Iowa

April 13, 2011
Will Hoyer

Will Hoyer

This week the Environmental Working Group released a report that shows that the rate of soil erosion in parts of Iowa is way worse than most people could have imagined.

Using data from the Iowa Daily Erosion Project, headed by agronomist Rick Cruse at Iowa State University, EWG’s report shows that Iowa’s statewide erosion rate of 5.2 tons per acre* can be very misleading and hides the fact that in some parts of the state a single 2007 storm led to over 100 tons per acre of topsoil eroding into rivers and streams in some parts of the state.

This illustrates the problem with averages. Sure, large parts of the state (the flatter parts of north-central Iowa, especially) might not be losing much soil at all, but other, hillier parts of the state are not doing so well.

And in some years, erosion might not be much of a problem because the storms just are not very severe, but as a report from earlier this year points out, climate change is driving more frequent and severe storms in Iowa — the kind that lead to catastrophic erosion.

Many current policies and practices are not helping the situation. When we speak in statewide averages we might think that those policies and practices are working better than they actually are.

Be sure to watch the 5 minute video that goes along with the report.

*In Iowa the “tolerable” soil loss amount, or “T,” is five tons per acre per year. This T value has been around for years and was theorized to be the rate at which soil was regenerated. Many experts question the validity of a T value of five and think that a truly sustainable soil loss limit would be significantly smaller

Posted by Will Hoyer, Research Associate

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