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Water sits on the back burner in Iowa’s election campaign
Staff Editorial
Oct. 29, 2022 6:00 am
There was some good news locally on the water quality front this month. The Iowa Department of Agriculture is partnering with the city of Cedar Rapids on a fresh round of conservation projects on farmland upstream along the Cedar River.
It’s part of an ongoing public-private partnership with upstream landowners to control polluted runoff from cropland, both to improve water quality and to mitigate flooding threats. One project is a bioreactor, a trench of wood chips, filtering tile lines on 120 acres of city owned rented farmland near the Tuma Sports Complex.
We welcome projects and partnerships. We commend the city for thinking beyond walls and levees. We thank landowners willing to participate.
But while touring the bioreactor project, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig revealed the broader problem. Namely a lack of will from state officials to put stronger laws in place to protect Iowa’s waterways.
“I’m not one to say that we shouldn’t plant even in areas that border rivers and streams because if we took all those acres out of production it would be a significant reduction in our acreage in the state of Iowa,” he told The Gazette’s Erin Jordan when asked whether the state should discourage farmers from planting in flood-prone areas.
If the state has no role in discouraging irresponsible farming practices, who does? The Clean Water Act, which just turned 50 years old, leaves regulation on non-point-source water pollution, such as farm runoff, to the states. Iowa relies on a scattershot array of taxpayer-funded partnerships that have done too little to clean up Iowa’s dirty water.
Democrat John Norwood, Naig’s opponent, seems to better grasp the problem.
“Iowa needs a modern vision for our highly productive but ‘unbalanced’ agricultural system. We’re still operating under a 1950s ‘productivity mindset’ that threatens the future of the state and the health of our people,” Norwood wrote in a recent Gazette guest column.
“Today’s world calls for adding a ‘resiliency and diversity mindset.’ Our first resource obligation is to protect Iowa’s water, biological systems and farm productivity for future generations …” Norwood wrote.
But most candidates running for state offices have said little about the need to find a new approach to water quality, given the ineffectiveness of current, voluntary measures. Many have expressed support for cleaning up water, mainly Democrats, but details are sketchy. If there are candidates calling for new water protection laws, we haven’t heard them.
This is understandable, given how the future of public education, abortion rights, the economy and other issues have grabbed center stage. But protecting Iowa’s waters should be a much bigger issue. Iowa counts conservation projects, but not enough of them. We fund projects, but fail to do the monitoring needed to see if the dollars are well spent. The Republican Statehouse follows the lead of powerful agricultural interests instead of leading. Our water stays dirty.
The political marketplace of ideas on water quality is closed for lack of inventory. Unless voters demand action, it will stay that way.
(319) 398-8262; editorial@thegazette.com
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