Rules optional for some, mandatory for others

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council and can be reached at [email protected].

You know how some memories stick with you for no logical reason? One of those memories concerns my father in the 1960s, when I was a teenager.

After World War II, my father worked for the city of Bloomfield and eventually became the operator of the city’s water treatment plant.

Pop graduated from high school on the eve of the Great Depression. His most intense period of book learning after high school came in the 1960s, when Iowa decided to require state licensing for operators of municipal water treatment plants and sewage treatment plants.

After so many years away from the classroom, this was a time of anxiety as Pop prepared to take the driver’s license exam. He attended classes in the evenings and spent other evenings with his nose in the textbooks.

All this happened about 60 years ago. More recently, a different and much larger contingent of Iowans are experiencing concerns about state regulations. This time, concerned people are angry that the government is not tackling all major pollution problems in the same way as water treatment and sewage treatment plants.

The basis for the state’s decision in the 1960s was simple – and it was a decision that Pop had no quarrel with, even amid the stress it caused him.

At the time, the state believed in mandatory training and operating standards for these treatment plants to ensure the quality and safety of Iowa’s drinking water and our public water resources.

State officials didn’t want Iowans drinking unsafe water. Officials did not want Iowa’s rivers and lakes to become polluted with untreated sewage from municipal wastewater systems. Officials did not want human waste to flow through the streets as it does in some poor countries.

These were not voluntary standards that cities like Bloomfield could meet. Compliance was not optional. Manufacturing and processing plant owners faced similar water and air quality standards decades ago – and meeting those standards wasn’t optional for them either.

The owners may have grumbled about those regulations. But eventually they accepted the reality that the air above their businesses and the water supplies they relied on belonged to everyone, not just their businesses.

Americans knew that following these scientific practices was necessary if society wanted to ensure that our water was safe for drinking, cooking, swimming, and fishing.

The attitude of a half-century ago — to do something, despite the costs, because it is for the greater good — is very different from the hands-off approach that Iowa government officials are taking today toward the pollution of Iowa’s rivers and lakes by livestock waste and agricultural chemicals. .

Government officials launched a voluntary program in 2013 to reduce agricultural pollution. Ten years later, any improvement is negligible at best.

The Des Moines Register recently wrote in an editorial: “Agriculture-related pollution is not getting better in Iowa. Water quality is not improving in Iowa. What we are doing is not working. Policymakers and agricultural groups need to start over and find an approach that does more than shrug at the depressing data.”

One person who refuses to shrug is Chris Jones. The retired University of Iowa water quality researcher discusses his assessment of our water problems in his sobering book: The Pig Republic, published in 2023 by the Ice Cube Press of North Liberty. It’s still available and I encourage you to read it.

Jones believes Iowans don’t understand how big the water quality problem is in our state.

About 3.2 million people live in Iowa, and almost all of their waste is processed in municipal sewage treatment plants, which are heavily regulated by state and federal governments.

No similar treatment is needed for the waste produced in enormous quantities by Iowa’s animal population — about 23 million hogs, 250,000 dairy cattle, 1.8 million beef cattle, 80 million egg-laying chickens and 4.7 million turkeys, Jones writes.

Most people don’t realize that these animals produce much more manure in total than the people who live here. According to Jones, no other state produces more fecal waste from livestock per square mile then Iowa.

Statewide, the amount of animal waste in Iowa is equal to the amount that would be produced if the state had a population of 168 million people (a population density of 2,979 people per square mile), instead of 3 million people, Jones found . Of course, no state has such a large population. California is the largest, with 39 million inhabitants. Texas is next with 30 million inhabitants.

That livestock waste in Iowa is spread on farmland, where rain and melting snow often wash it into streams, rivers and lakes before it can be incorporated as organic fertilizer. That contamination of surface water supplies is why people are discouraged from swimming in many Iowa rivers and lakes, using some of our state beaches or eating fish caught in those waters.

The livestock industry certainly has a positive impact on Iowa’s economy. It means thousands of jobs in livestock farming, trucking, meatpacking, agricultural supply sales and similar businesses.

But what Jones calls “the ecological wreckage” that comes with being a prime country for agriculture also needs to be addressed – even if our political leaders prefer to minimize its impact.

Iowans would not tolerate human sewage flowing through the streets of our communities. We should also not be complacent when livestock waste ends up in our rivers and lakes, as is happening now. There is no logic in having standards that some people have to meet while others get a passing grade.

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Editor’s Note from Laura Belin: Chris Jones continues to write about Iowa’s water quality issues in his email newsletter, The Swine Republic. He also leads a new nonprofit focused on this problem: Driftless Water Defenders.