❝ Depending on your perspective, the Des Moines Water Works lawsuit against three agriculture-heavy Iowa counties to hold them accountable for harmful nitrate contamination in the Raccoon River water supply can be a few things: a battle between farmers upstream and urban water users downstream, a common sense plan to get polluters to pay or a costly intrusion into private land use…

❝ For Bill Stowe, general manager of the Des Moines Water Works, the nitrate problem was so acute in 2015 that the decision to sue was necessary…

We have spent several decades trying to work collaboratively with agriculture groups. Realistically that has gotten us nowhere. The curve continues to deteriorate in terms of water quality that we are experiencing here in central Iowa. We think that we are in a water quality crisis…It’s clear that we are facing a far worse condition in 2016 than we did 25 years ago.

❝ The federal lawsuit came in 2015 after the Water Works was forced to operate their nitrate removal system for long stretches when record-high levels of the toxic nitrogen compound were present in the Raccoon River, the water supply for 500,000 people in the Mississippi River basin. Sac County, named in the suit, had testing done on its waterways that empty into the Raccoon and some were found to be five times higher than the standards EPA deems safe, according to the utility. Besides simply recovering the $1.5 million it cost to run the denitrification system in 2015, the utility had higher aims of halting pollution at its source. In this case the utility established that the primary pollution source is runoff from farm fields and animal operations that flow from tile drainage (subsurface drains) and end up in streams, lakes, rivers and, eventually, the mighty Mississippi.

Farmers and producers offer the usual crap conservative solution: voluntary compliance. Hasn’t worked. Never will.

❝ Frustration and lack of an aggressive water quality plan led Water Works to the courts to pursue a novel legal strategy that asserts that county drainage districts are point-source polluters that are directly identifiable because their infrastructure carries nutrient-rich farm runoff. The districts manage and maintain this infrastructure, so it’s the Water Works claim that the districts, supervised by the counties, are on the hook for the water…

Agribiz has their knickers in a bunch because any reasonable finding of responsibility leaves them open to lawsuits from everyone downstream from their pollution. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time for them to free up a little money from their favorite hedge funds and act responsibly.