Opinion: Suppression of Iowa water quality data is an attempt to control you

Iowa Republicans want to destroy a one-of-a-kind monitoring system and data platform that brings real-time water quality information to your devices from 60 stream locations widely dispersed around the state. Iowans have invested approximately $2 million to purchase these water quality sensors and probably at least that much in human resources to operate and maintain the system and research the generated data.

Three sensors at two monitoring sites have also been deployed on the high-profile Bloody Run Creek in northeast Iowa, one of only 34 outstanding Iowa waters as designated by Department of Natural Resources and a self-sustaining trout stream. Recent rain brought the nitrate there to almost 26 parts per million (water safe to drink should be less than 10), an overnight event that would have otherwise been uncaptured. These are downstream of the controversial Supreme Beef cattle feedlot, operated by the son-in-law of Iowa state Sen. Dan Zumbach, a Republican from Ryan. In the just-completed legislative session, Zumbach sponsored legislation, Senate File 558, that reduced funding to the Iowa Nutrient Research Center at Iowa State University by $500,000, the recently agreed upon amount that would fund the monitoring sensor network going forward at the University of Iowa.

More: Editorial: Iowa Republicans stick their fingers in their ears on water quality

A reasonable person might conclude that the worse our water is, the more we need a robust monitoring system. There are some in the Legislature, however, who maintain that there is nothing wrong with our water, despite what the truth actually is: Thousands of private wells contaminated with nitrate and E. coli to unhealthy levels, 25% of the state’s population drinking water from community supplies where nitrate mitigation treatment is necessary, Iowa the largest contributor to the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, state beaches posted as off-limits due to pollution every summer, and only 15 stream stretches in 70,000 miles of perennial streams meeting all their designated uses defined under the Clean Water Act.

Agriculture is the main polluter, and the industry and allies in the Legislature (often one and the same), assisted by our complicit state agencies, endeavor to control the messaging on water quality and progress toward our water quality goals as outlined in the Nutrient Reduction Strategy. Actual water quality data gets in the way of their messaging. This is a travesty for the 98% of us who don’t farm.

Efforts are ongoing to fund the sensor network at lower level through the Iowa Nutrient Research Center and private sources, so the network may not be dead. Rest assured, however, that Republicans’ concern over clean water and the state’s overall environmental integrity is. While Democrats are hardly blameless for the state’s degraded condition, Republicans are interested in looking at this issue only insofar as how it degrades the public’s perception of Big Ag and the millionaires who run it, and not how it might degrade your quality of life. I’ve seen firsthand that the industry’s effort to "message" water quality is not done in good faith and should be seen only as the farce that it is.

After a century of stream and lake degradation and overall bad water, Iowans should expect better than propaganda and obfuscation from the people who degraded the water and are more than happy to entrench the degraded status quo. Orwell saw that “until they (the public) become conscious they will never rebel.” Make no mistake, repression of data collection, science and research is an attempt to keep you from becoming conscious about your water and demanding change.

And demand change we must if we are to get the clean water, air and land that we deserve. Sure — contact your legislators and hold them accountable. But it must be more than that. Recognize that change must start at the local level. Many of our cities have been complicit, if not outright collaborative, in agriculture’s expropriation of the natural resources that belong to us as citizens. Attend your local city council and county supervisor meetings and agitate for clean water. Things will only improve at a glacial pace, and more than likely will get worse, if the issue is left in the claws of the three-headed monster that is our Legislature, agribusiness, and farmers.

Chris Jones recently retired as a research engineer at the University of Iowa.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Opinion: Suppression of Iowa water data is an attempt to control you