clean water act - Prairie Rivers of Iowa

Can Infrastructure Spending Help Iowa’s Polluted Rivers?

by Dan Haug | Jan 1, 2024

The display department for the plans. If you've read Douglas Adams, you'll appreciate the joke.

“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.”

– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I was reminded of this scene after spending a long day cross-referencing the Raccoon River TMDL (a pollution budget for nitrate and E. coli) with permits and monitoring data for wastewater treatment plants. In this case, I suspected that polluters were getting away with something, but I’ve had just as much trouble finding information when I wanted to document a success story.

Effluent limits for nitrogen are not strict. Wastewater treatment plants and meatpacking plants in the Raccoon River watershed routinely discharge treated wastewater with nitrate 4-6x the drinking water standard. Why is this allowed? The 2008 Raccoon River TMDL capped pollution from point sources at the existing level, rather than calling for reductions. Due to limited data, the wasteload allocations were an over-estimate, assuming maximum flow and no removal during treatment.

That’s all above board, but someone else at the DNR went a step further. Wasteload allocations in the TMDL were further inflated by a factor of two or three to arrive at effluent limits in the permits, using a procedure justified in an obscure interdepartmental memo. The limits are expressed as total Kjeldahl nitrogen, even though the authors of the TMDL made it clear that other forms of nitrogen are readily converted to nitrate during treatment and in the river. In short, the limits in the permit allow more nitrogen to be discharged than normally comes in with the raw sewage!

For example:

The Storm Lake sewage treatment plant has an effluent limit of 2,052 lbs/day total Kjeldahl nitrogen (30-day avg). Total Kjeldahl nitrogen in the raw sewage is around 1000 lbs/day.
The Tyson meatpacking plant in Storm Lake has an effluent limit of 6,194 lbs/day total Kjeldahl nitrogen (30-day avg). Total Kjeldahl nitrogen in the raw influent is around 4,000 lbs/day.
I also checked a permit affected by the (now withdrawn) Cedar River TMDL. Same story. The Cedar Falls sewage treatment plant has an effluent limit of 1,303 lbs/day total nitrogen (30-day avg). Average total nitrogen in the raw sewage is between 1000-1500 lbs/day.
Confused about the units? That may be deliberate. Total Kjeldahl nitrogen includes ammonia and nitrogen in organic matter. Nitrogen in raw sewage is mostly in these forms, which need to converted to nitrate or removed with the sludge in order to meet other limits and avoid killing fish. Nitrogen in treated effluent is mostly in the form of nitrate. At the Tyson plant, the effluent leaving the plant has around 78 mg/L nitrate, versus 4 mg/L TKN, but figuring that out required several calculations. At smaller plants, the data to calculate nitrate pollution isn’t even collected.

As part of the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, large point source polluters are supposed to evaluate the feasibility of reducing nitrate to 10 mg/L, and phosphorus to 1 mg/L. Tyson did a feasibility study for phosphorus removal, and is now adding new treatment to its Storm Lake plant. However, it is not required to evaluate or implement further nitrogen reduction, “because it is already subject to a technology-based limit from the ELG.” This federal Effluent Limitation Guideline was challenged in court by environmental groups this year, and is now being revised by the EPA. It allows meatpacking plants to discharge a daily maximum of 194 mg/L total nitrogen!

Fortunately, all this creative permitting has little impact on the cost and safety of drinking water in the Des Moines metro. According to research in the TMDL, point sources only account for about 10% of the nitrogen load, on days when nitrate in the Raccoon River exceeds the drinking water standard. However, the figure is much higher (30%) for the North Raccoon River. I started looking at permits and effluent monitoring because I was trying to explain some unusual data from nitrate sensors, brought to my attention by friends with the Raccoon River Watershed Association. During a fall with very little rain (less than 0.04 inches in November at Storm Lake), nitrate in the North Raccoon River near Sac City remained very high (8 to 11 mg/L). The two largest point sources upstream of that site can easily account for half the nitrogen load during that period.

I was glad to be able to solve a mystery, and hope that this investigation can lead to some tools and teaching materials to help others identify when and where point sources could be influencing rivers. The load-duration curves in the 200-page Raccoon River TMDL are very good, but some people might benefit from something simpler, like this table. In general, the bigger the facility, the smaller the river, and the drier the weather, the more point sources of pollution can influence water quality, and the more wastewater treatment projects can make a difference.

Spreadsheet for estimating impact of wastewater.

I made this table to estimate how biological nutrient removal in Nevada and Oskaloosa (about 1 MGD each) could improve water quality in the South Skunk River (about 1000 cfs on average near Oskaloosa, but there could be greater benefit in tributaries, or when rivers are lower).

In this work, I’m supported by partners around the state and a grant from the Water Foundation. The project (Movement Infrastructure for Clean Water in Iowa) focuses on building connections and shared tools around water monitoring, and will continue through this spring and summer. The funders’ interest is in helping the environmental movement make the most of the “once-in-generation opportunity” presented by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. This fiscal year, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is adding $28 million to Iowa’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which provides low-interest loans to communities to replace aging sewer systems and treatment plants. Can that infrastructure spending help Iowa’s polluted rivers? We won’t know for sure without better use of water quality data, and greater transparency in state government.

Appreciating Water and Wastewater Workers

by Dan Haug | Aug 23, 2023

Water and Wastewater Workers of Iowa Week!

In August the governor issued a proclamation recognizing these essential workers. I’ve had the privilege to get to know some of the folks who make sure the water in the tap is clean enough to drink, that the wastewater we flush doesn’t contaminate rivers, and that the storm sewers drain the streets without causing downstream flooding or pollution.

Ames WPCF Superintendent Tyler Ver Meer at an open house. Note the watershed map!

Sure, these kinds of jobs can involve reading meters, reviewing construction documents, doing inspections, and testing water quality. But it can also involve live-trapping turtles to stop them from damaging an expensive baffle curtain in a wastewater treatment lagoon by sitting on it (Tim Mattingly, City of Gilbert). It can involve handing out rubber duckies and demonstrating a flood model for kids at a school science night (Liz Calhoun and Jake Moore, Ames Public Works). It can involve taking time out of a busy schedule to attend meetings about watersheds and water monitoring (thanks to staff from Ames, Gilbert, Nevada, Roland, and Huxley who have come to mine). And it can involve canceling that meeting and rushing to the sewage treatment plant to help contain a spill when a valve breaks (this happened once to Ashley Geesman and Neil Weiss, Ames Water & Pollution Control).

I’ve been getting even more appreciation for wastewater treatment plants and the people who run them as I’ve researched and filmed Facts 31-35 of our weekly video series, “The Clean Water Act: 50 Years, 50 Facts.”

At a basic level, sewage treatment involves harnessing microbes to break down organic matter that would otherwise consume the oxygen in the water as it decomposes, and improving water clarity by allowing the solid material to settle out. Widespread secondary treatment of wastewater has taken care of some of the worst pollution that was affecting America’s rivers when the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972. But processes aimed at TSS (a metric of water clarity)and CBOD5 (a metric of oxygen consumption) doesn’t always get various forms of nitrogen (nitrate and ammonia), phosphorus, E. coli bacteria, or chloride down to an acceptable level. We’ve seen that in some our water monitoring results.

However, communities in Iowa continue to invest in improvements to their sewage treatment systems. NPDES permits have to be renewed every five years, and additional requirements come into play when a facility is renovated to increase capacity or replace deteriorating infrastructure. Some examples from the South Skunk River watershed include:

The City of Nevada is building a new plant (to be completed in 2024) that will include systems to remove additional nitrogen and phosphorus. Ames, Oskaloosa, and Newton also are planning nutrient removal systems.
The City of Ames spends over $3 million each year to repair or replace aging sanitary sewers.
The City of Gilbert installed an extra stage to better treat ammonia during the winter months.
A homeowner’s association near Gilbert is switching its water source to reduce the need for water softeners and the chloride (salt) pollution that comes with it.
Over the last decade, UV disinfection systems to address fecal bacteria have been installed in sewage treatment plants in Ames, Newton, Story City, Huxley, Roland, Gilbert, Cambridge, and a neighborhood association. Colfax uses chlorine disinfection. Oskaloosa, Maxwell and Nevada have upgrades in the works.

However, if non-point sources of pollution like agricultural runoff and stormwater aren’t addressed, cities and towns reach a point of diminishing returns where sewer rates are going up but water quality in the river isn’t getting noticeably better. That’s why it’s exciting to see more water utilities breaking out of traditional silos and partnering with farmers on conservation projects in their watersheds.

(Edit 2023-12-29: The numbers I was using are potentially confusing and not relevant to the point I was making, so I have deleted them. According to models used for the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, point sources of pollution like wastewater account for 5% of the nitrogen load and 12% of the phosphorus load during the 2006-2010 benchmark period. The South Skunk River as a whole has a similar breakdown, but the stretch between Ames and Colfax has a higher percentage of pollution from point sources.)

Notable Quotes from Sackett v. EPA

by Dan Haug | May 30, 2023

We’re almost halfway through our weekly video series “The Clean Water Act: 50 Years, 50 Facts” which tries to explain the consequential and complex environmental law in 90 second chunks accompanied by some rock and pop favorites from the ’70s and ’80s that I’ve adapted to include lyrics about environmental law. On May 25, a major decision by the Supreme Court (Sackett v. EPA) reshaped the legal landscape, so our episodes in June will focus on Section 404 of the Clean Water Act and the definition of “waters of the United States” to give you some context.

Clean Water Act 50 Years 50 Facts Playlist

I have mixed feelings about this area of law, informed by an entry-level job at Wisconsin DNR that involved documenting wetland losses and auditing wetland fill permits. In my opinion, decades of litigation and Congressional gridlock have resulted in some compromises which satisfy no-one: the system is confusing and expensive for developers and landowners but doesn’t do enough to protect aquatic ecosystems from “death by a thousand cuts.” If there was a constituency for “environmental federalism”, maybe I could see a path forward, but opposition to federal environmental regulation generally goes hand in hand with opposition to environmental protection at the local and state level. In Idaho, the Sackett’s neighborhood is one of many being built in wetlands along Priest Lake with the approval of a conservative county government. Here in Iowa, the legislature has recently considered bills that would have limited the ability of county governments and land trusts to purchase sensitive natural areas for parks, and limited the ability of cities to regulate development for the purposes of flood control.

But enough about my personal opinions, let’s talk legal opinions. While all nine justices agreed to overturn the Circuit Court’s decision in favor of the Sacketts, four justices thought the majority went too far in limiting the scope of the Clean Water Act. A few choice quotes from the concurring opinions in Sackett v. EPA (with legal citations removed for brevity) really help to illustrate what’s at stake.

From Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence, joined by Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson:

The Clean Water Act generally prohibits dumping dredged or fill material without a permit into the “waters of the United States.” The “waters of the United States” include wetlands that are “adjacent” to waters covered by the Act—for example, wetlands that are adjacent to covered rivers or lakes. The question in this case is whether the wetlands on the Sacketts’ residential property are adjacent to covered waters and therefore covered under the Act.

I agree with the Court’s reversal of the Ninth Circuit. In particular, I agree with the Court’s decision not to adopt the “significant nexus” test for determining whether a wetland is covered under the Act. And I agree with the Court’s bottom-line judgment that the wetlands on the Sacketts’ property are not covered by the Act and are therefore not subject to permitting requirements.

I write separately because I respectfully disagree with the Court’s new test for assessing when wetlands are covered by the Clean Water Act. The Court concludes that wetlands are covered by the Act only when the wetlands have a “continuous surface connection” to waters of the United States—that is, when the wetlands are “adjoining” covered waters…

Recall again how the 1977 Act came about. In 1975, the Army Corps concluded that the 1972 Act’s coverage of “waters of the United States” included “adjacent” wetlands. In 1977, Congress adopted a new permitting program for a category of “waters of the United States.” Congress allocated to the Federal Government exclusive authority to issue Clean Water Act permits for dumping dredged or fill material into certain “waters of the United States,” “including wetlands adjacent thereto.” … Congress’s 1977 decision was no accident. As this Court has previously recognized, “the scope of the Corps’ asserted jurisdiction over wetlands”—including the Corps’ decision to cover adjacent wetlands—“was specifically brought to Congress’ attention” in 1977, “and Congress rejected measures designed to curb the Corps’ jurisdiction.” …

The eight [presidential] administrations since 1977 have maintained dramatically different views of how to regulate the environment, including under the Clean Water Act. Some of those administrations promulgated very broad interpretations of adjacent wetlands. Others adopted far narrower interpretations. Yet all of those eight different administrations have recognized as a matter of law that the Clean Water Act’s coverage of adjacent wetlands means more than adjoining wetlands and also includes wetlands separated from covered waters by man-made dikes or barriers, natural river berms, beach dunes, or the like…

The difference between “adjacent” and “adjoining” in this context is not merely semantic or academic. The Court’s rewriting of “adjacent” to mean “adjoining” will matter a great deal in the real world. In particular, the Court’s new and overly narrow test may leave long-regulated and long accepted-to-be-regulable wetlands suddenly beyond the scope of the agencies’ regulatory authority, with negative consequences for waters of the United States. For example, the Mississippi River features an extensive levee system to prevent flooding. Under the Court’s “continuous surface connection” test, the presence of those levees (the equivalent of a dike) would seemingly preclude Clean Water Act coverage of adjacent wetlands on the other side of the levees, even though the adjacent wetlands are often an important part of the flood-control project…

The Court’s erroneous test not only will create real-world consequences for the waters of the United States, but also is sufficiently novel and vague (at least as a single standalone test) that it may create regulatory uncertainty for the Federal Government, the States, and regulated parties. … How does that test apply to the many kinds of wetlands that typically do not have a surface water connection to a covered water year-round—for example, wetlands and waters that are connected for much of the year but not in the summer when they dry up to some extent? How “temporary” do “interruptions in surface connection” have to be for wetlands to still be covered?

From Justice Kagan’s concurring opinion, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson:

[M]ake no mistake: Congress wrote the statute it meant to. The Clean Water Act was a landmark piece of environmental legislation, designed to address a problem of “crisis proportions.” …

Vital to the Clean Water Act’s project is the protection of wetlands—both those contiguous to covered waters and others nearby. As this Court (again, formerly) recognized, wetlands “serve to filter and purify water draining into adjacent bodies of water, and to slow the flow of surface runoff into lakes, rivers, and streams.”

At the same time, wetlands play a crucial part in flood control (if anything, more needed now than when the statute was enacted). And wetlands perform those functions … not only when they are touching a covered water but also when they are separated from it by a natural or artificial barrier—say, a berm or dune or dike or levee….

Today’s majority, though, believes Congress went too far. … Congress, the majority scolds, has unleashed the EPA to regulate “swimming pools and puddles,” wreaking untold havoc on “a staggering array of landowners.” Surely something has to be done; and who else to do it but this Court? It must rescue property owners from Congress’s too-ambitious program of pollution control.

As the majority concedes, the statute “tells us that at least some wetlands must qualify as ‘waters of the United States.’” … It relies as well on a judicially manufactured clear-statement rule. When Congress (so says the majority) exercises power “over private property”—particularly, over “land and water use”—it must adopt “exceedingly clear language.” There is, in other words, a thumb on the scale for property owners—no matter that the Act (i.e., the one Congress enacted) is all about stopping property owners from polluting. ….

A court may, on occasion, apply a clear-statement rule to deal with statutory vagueness or ambiguity. But a court may not rewrite Congress’s plain instructions because they go further than preferred. That is what the majority does today in finding that the Clean Water Act excludes many wetlands (clearly) “adjacent” to covered waters. …

And still more fundamentally, why ever have a thumb on the scale against the Clean Water Act’s protections? … Today’s pop-up clear-statement rule is explicable only as a reflexive response to Congress’s enactment of an ambitious scheme of environmental regulation. It is an effort to cabin the anti-pollution actions Congress thought appropriate. … And that, too, recalls last Term, when I remarked on special canons “magically appearing as get-out-of-text-free cards” to stop the EPA from taking the measures Congress told it to. There, the majority’s non-textualism barred the EPA from addressing climate change by curbing power plant emissions in the most effective way. Here, that method prevents the EPA from keeping our country’s waters clean by regulating adjacent wetlands. The vice in both instances is the same: the Court’s appointment of itself as the national decision-maker on environmental policy….

Because that is not how I think our Government should work—more, because it is not how the Constitution thinks our Government should work—I respectfully concur in the judgment only.

Clean Water Act: 50 years, 50 facts

by Dan Haug | Jan 27, 2023

“The Clean Water Act: 50 Years, 50 Facts” will be a weekly series of short videos on our Instagram and YouTube channels, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, and focusing on rivers and lakes in Iowa. At the time I wrote this, we had published the first four episodes and recorded material for the next four.

The Clean Water Act is a law that works best when concerned citizens are paying attention and speaking up, so it’s worth the trouble to make sense of legal jargon like a point source, 303(d) list, 319 grants, NPDES permits, and the ordinary high water mark. Yikes! We’ll cover these topics and more in accessible and bite-sized chunks!

Environmental policy can be a dry subject, so we’re having some fun with it! I take full responsibility for the theme music, inspired by a Steely Dan hit that debuted a month after the Clean Water Act. You can thank Daniel Huber and Mike Kellner for making the videos pretty and putting them out there; I’m clueless when it comes to social media.

The videos are less than 90 seconds and are best viewed on a smartphone in portrait mode. The first few were me talking from my office, but I’ve already started taking field trips (Fact #6 was filmed in front of an effluent pipe) and I hope to feature guests whose job or advocacy work intersects with the Clean Water Act.

Watch the Entire Series Here (Check Back Each Week for New Episodes)

The Clean Water Act is a big law. I know a lot about some pieces and very little about other pieces. My reference books for the series will be EPA’s Watershed Academy Web and River Network’s Clean Water Act Owner’s Manual. If I overlook something, you’ll hear from my “fact-checker” in the description or comments section.

I want this to be relevant, so I will sometimes follow up on a fact with some commentary or include a link to policy recommendations from other organizations. For example, here’s a report from the Environmental Integrity Project on how to close the gap between the CWA’s goals and reality. Yes, I work for an environmental organization and we would like some more environmental protection, please.

However, I can understand why many people see environmental regulation as burdensome. I hope that a better understanding of how the system works (or doesn’t work) could help us find some common ground. My perspective on environmental law is informed by a stint at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources where I learned how complicated it can be to fill a small amount of wetland legally, and how often people got away with filling a large amount, illegally. What if fewer projects needed a permit, but we had tougher enforcement? Wouldn’t that save more wetlands on balance, while leveling the playing field and reducing compliance costs for most businesses?

And if common ground is out of reach in today’s political climate, hey, it’s just some short videos. Enjoy!

You can lead a horse to water…

by Dan Haug | Jan 2, 2023

Prairie Rivers of Iowa is not the sort of environmental group that follows the goings on at the state capitol (that would be our friends at the Iowa Environmental Council) but the success of our watershed projects is very much affected by state and federal policy. A big part of our work is environmental education, but often “is a river still polluted and what can we do about it” is a legal and political question as much as a scientific question. I hope this tricky case study from the Cedar River will illustrate why we need more people to learn about and talk about environmental policy to make it more transparent, fair, and effective.

My New Year’s resolution for 2023 is to write fewer long articles like this one and more bite-sized lessons. For the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, we’ll be sharing 50 short facts (one a week) on social media about that important and complicated law. Here are the first five:

1) The Clean Water Act (CWA) is 50 years old but it still has a big influence on how we evaluate and protect water quality in rivers and lakes.

2) The Clean Water Act is a federal law but is implemented at the state level, with oversight from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In Iowa, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is responsible for issuing permits, setting standards, and assessing the condition of rivers and lakes.

3) The Clean Water Act requires public notice and public comment for many decisions. Staff at environmental agencies read and take seriously public comments, so it’s worth speaking up and having your voice heard.

4) The Clean Water Act also gives concerned citizens the standing to file suit if there is an ongoing violation that hasn’t been enforced, or if the Environmental Protection Agency is not fulfilling its mandatory duties.

5) Decisions by courts and federal agencies can come into conflict with state legislatures, which control the budgets for state agencies. For example, in Iowa there are over 700 river segments and lakes on the waiting list for a cleanup plan, because Department for Natural Resources doesn’t have enough staff to keep up with it.

We can sum that up with the old saying: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

In November, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) made the unusual decision to withdraw a cleanup plan (or TMDL) for nitrate in a part of the Cedar River that supplies drinking water to Cedar Rapids. Click here for the original plan, here for the public notice of its withdrawal, and here for the Iowa Environmental Council’s response, which provides some valuable context. TMDL stands for “Total Maximum Daily Load.” TMDLs are pollution budgets that explain where pollution is coming from and how much needs to be reduced in order to protect fisheries, drinking water, or recreation in an impaired river or lake. They are often used to set permit conditions for upstream sewage treatment plants and industrial facilities.

leading a horse to polluted water in the the Cedar River

There is a joke that TMDL stands for “Too Many D*** Lawyers.” Most state agencies ignored the part of the Clean Water Act dealing with TMDLs until a series of lawsuits by environmental groups in the 1990s. The Cedar River TMDL was actually written under a court order in 2006. The TMDL estimated that only 9% of the nitrogen in the Cedar River watershed was coming from regulated point sources of pollution like sewage treatment plants and factories. Most of the reductions would need to come from agriculture, through voluntary conservation programs. Still, the plan called for capping the pollution from point sources at the 2006 amount and not adding any more. However, it seems that the DNR did not follow the TMDL when writing permits over the next decade, and did not enforce permit violations.

One of the most surprising violations is from a drinking water treatment plant in Waverly. I don’t think of drinking water treatment as generating pollution, and maybe that’s why it was initially overlooked. The facility uses reverse osmosis, which gives you cleaner water on one side of the membrane and dirtier water on the other side. The facility has been discharging wastewater with 37.7 mg/L of nitrate into the Shell Rock River (a tributary of the Cedar). When the DNR added a permit condition that nitrate be brought down to 9.5 mg/L, the Iowa Regional Utilities Association protested, claiming that compliance would cost them $1 million. If my math is correct, bringing the facility into compliance would avoid only 5 tons of nitrogen pollution per year. The TMDL calls for a reduction of 9,999 tons per year. Enforcing this permit as written does not seem like a fair or effective way to protect water quality in the river, but I suspect there would be an easy fix if the TMDL were revised.

The Clean Water Act provides two ways to set the limits in a permit. Water quality-based effluent limits reference the pollution budget in a TMDL. They’re only for facilities that discharge to an impaired water body. Technology-based effluent limits are set statewide, based on the level of treatment that’s possible with widely available, not-too-expensive technologies. The Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy included new technology-based effluent limits for nitrate and phosphorus, affecting 157 municipal and industrial wastewater treatment systems. They must find a way to reduce their total nitrogen by 66% and their total phosphorus by 75% or else complete a feasibility study to show it would be cost-prohibitive to do so. Some facilities are already making the upgrades, some won’t be done until 2027. For the largest point source in the TMDL (the Waterloo sewage treatment plant), that means a reduction of some 333 tons of nitrogen a year.

Effluent from a wastewater treatment plant entering a river.

Of course, most of the nitrate reduction goal for the watershed (9,999 tons) will need to come from agriculture. We don’t know how that’s going because Iowa doesn’t have a current or complete tracking system. The most recent data I could find for cover crops by watershed is 7 years old. At that time, there were not enough acres to make a noticeable difference in water quality in the river.

Cover crops in the Cedar River watershed

Cedar River watershed map, courtesy of IIHR

Side note: The Cedar River starts in Minnesota and has several major tributaries, including the Shell Rock River, West Fork, and Winnebago. It’s a big watershed that usually gets divided into smaller chunks (i.e. there are separate watershed management authorities for the Upper, Middle, and Lower Cedar). The TMDL actually recommended prioritizing conservation in the Upper Cedar, but at some point, the focus got shifted to the Middle Cedar.

Are water quality based-effluent limits still needed? Maybe not, but the frustrating thing about this case is that we get don’t get a revised pollution budget that shows how other strategies will protect drinking water in Cedar Rapids. We don’t get a public debate over what’s not working with this law and an opportunity to change it. Instead, we get excuses for why a revised TMDL can’t be done and isn’t needed. Some of those excuses are legitimate: the chronically underfunded DNR has a lot of TMDLs to write and not enough staff to do it. Some of the excuses are flimsy: apparently, the document mishandled nitrogen units in a way that was too subtle for me to notice on the first read-through but serious enough to make the whole thing unworkable.

Another excuse—that the Cedar River is no longer impaired—seemed like a mistake at first but turned out to be technically correct on closer inspection. “No longer impaired” means that fewer than 10% of the samples collected during the last two assessment periods (2016-2018 and 2018-2020) exceeded the drinking water standard. I’ve double-checked this with another source of data and think this assessment holds up, even if we account for weather. It’s just premature. Nitrate was back up in 2022.

Well, you know what they say. You can lead a state agency to water, but they can’t make it drinkable.

(Apologies to my respected colleagues at DNR. I can’t resist a good pun!)