FOCUS: GOLF & RECREATION

Survey of human resources managers ties environmental issues to ability to recruit top-level managers

If David Osterberg needed confirmation of a link between the issues improving Iowa’s water quality and transforming the state into a playground for young people, it came in 2000 when he was working on global-warming issues for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. A group of students from Iowa State University and Grinnell College showed up at the state Capitol in a rental truck, ready to lobby legislators on a water-quality bill. A sign on the side of the truck, Osterberg said, delivered a terse message: “Gov. Vilsack, clean up the air and clean up the water, or we’re out of here.”

At the time, policymakers perplexed by the exodus of young people from the state were debating tax breaks and other financial incentives as a stopgap measure. “The students were saying, ‘We’re getting our stuff together; we’re giving you one more chance,'” said Osterberg, a former state legislator and U.S. Senate candidate who is currently executive director of the non-partisan Iowa Policy Project, which he founded three years ago to analyze public policy issues, and an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Iowa.

The student environmentalists who lobbied the Legislature in 2000 may have been encouraged in January when Gov. Tom Vilsack delivered his Condition of the State address. In it, the governor noted that more than 150 of the state’s lakes, rivers and streams are listed as “impaired” by the DNR.

“By 2010, there should be no impaired waters listed in our state,” Vilsack said. “By that year, Iowans should be free to swim and fish and use these great natural resources as God intended. To those who doubt such a goal is attainable, I simply ask you: Stand aside.”

Environmentalists have praised Vilsack for taking a bold stand on an issue that is especially thorny in Corn Belt states such as Iowa, where 60 percent of the land is used for intensive row-crop production. Such farming practices are a big contributor of nutrients, including nitrogen and phosphorous, and sediment, which have turned Iowa’s once clear waters dark and murky. They also say environmental stewardship is not only an important quality-of-life and health issue, but should be a key part of the state’s overall economic development strategy.

“What I’m most concerned about,” said Iowa Environmental Council Executive Director Elizabeth Horton Plasket, “is that we’re going to put big money into economic development, into specialized companies and into specialized industries, but the return on the investment will be lower because we’re not taking care of the very basics of our lifestyle.

“We have the Loess Hills; the Neal Smith Prairie Center, a federally protected prairie with free-ranging buffalo; cold-water trout streams; Iowa’s Great Lakes. And as they decline, so, too, will our reputation of quality of life, and so, too, will the people who want to come here.”

Mindful of forecasts of a shortage of between 91,000 and 154,000 Iowa workers by 2010, Osterberg’s group has commissioned a survey of 86 human resource managers in Ames and Des Moines to determine the extent to which the state’s environmental quality and its outdoor recreational opportunities affect their ability to recruit candidates for top management positions.

Results of the study by Gina McAndrews, a post-doctorate researcher in ISU’s agronomy department, are still being compiled. So far, however, two-thirds of the HR managers surveyed have said parks, trails, preserves, clean water and clean air are somewhat or very important to the people they recruit for management positions. They also listed lakes, rivers and bicycle trails as recreational opportunities that are most likely to increase their recruitment success.

The governor’s goal for clean water by 2010 is within reach, Plasket said, but not if funding for environmental programs continues to decline.     In the 2000 fiscal year, the state ranked 48th in the country in conservation and environmental protection spending. Iowa spent $66 million on those issues that year, but in the three years since, funding has dwindled to $38 million, a loss of 42 percent. About $3 million of that is used for surface-water testing.

The testing is important to establish historical data. Testing was almost non-existent before 2000, said Osterberg, who canoed on about three dozen Iowa rivers during his 1998 campaign for the U.S. Senate, collecting water samples as he paddled to focus attention on water-quality issues.

“I saw an awful lot of Iowa’s rivers – some healthy ones, and some you didn’t want to canoe much in,” he said. “What I did not find very often was blue water. We’ve got a giant problem with nutrients.”

“Iowa rivers are awful, not just compared to the rest of the nation,” Osterberg said, citing an assessment of America’s rivers by the U.S. Geological Survey, a division of the Department of the Interior, that found nitrate levels to be 11 times higher in Iowa than nationwide. “Other Corn Belt states seemed to be a lot lower.”

Osterberg said the big challenge is to “figure out how to get agriculture and tourism to cooperate.”

“So far,” he said, “it’s not been easy.”

Though more than 150 bodies of water are on the “impaired” list, Iowa’s water quality problems “are not as bad as some people would lead you to believe,” said Jack Riessen, chief of the DNR’s Water Quality Bureau. All it takes to qualify as “impaired” is for one or more pollutant to be found.

“‘Impaired’ water simply means the water body does not meet one or more of the state quality standards,” he said. “It doesn’t mean it’s highly polluted, that you can’t swim in it, can’t fish – a sort of boiling froth that, if you put your foot in there, you’re going to die.”

Even so, he said, there’s room for improvement.

His agency is working on a statewide nutrient management strategy to better identify both the source and the amount of nutrients flowing into Mississippi River tributaries and, eventually, into the Gulf of Mexico, where the “dead zone” is blamed primarily on agricultural practices in Midwest farm states. Excessive nutrients, primarily nitrogen and phosphorous, promote algae growth, and when the algae die and decompose, dissolved oxygen levels plummet, causing sea life to die. The “dead zone” stretches from the Mississippi Delta to the Texas border, and from near the shore along the Louisiana coast out to 100-foot water depths. The “dead zone” contains approximately 7,728 square miles, about the size of New Jersey or, if placed in the Heartland, the land mass between Des Moines and Chicago.

According to the group American Rivers, most of the nitrogen flowing into the Gulf of Mexico comes from farmland in southern Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. Iowa and Illinois, the group said, drain only 9 percent of the Mississippi River basin, but account for as much as 35 percent of the nitrogen washed into the river during years of average rainfall.

Riessen believes Iowa should develop a comprehensive approach to improving water quality “instead of piecemeal here and there.” Now, farmers can apply for federal and state money to establish wetlands and riparian buffer strips, but Riessen said the funds don’t always go where they can do the most good.

“We need more of a targeted instead of a shotgun approach,” he said. “We don’t have enough money to do everything, so we should target where it makes the most sense.”

Plasket of the Iowa Environmental Council said great strides could be taken in improving water quality by restoring funding to close Iowa’s 166 remaining agricultural drainage wells, which inject nutrients and pesticides directly into the groundwater, which is “extraordinarily hard to clean up,” she said. The cost could be as high as $500,000 to close some wells, she said, but others would be less expensive.

“We’ve got to get people thinking about creative alternatives and replacing part or all of the tile drainage systems with wetlands, which provide natural filtering, are good for the environment, good for diversity, good for cropland, good for the river, good for everything,” she said.

Some state and federal lawmakers are trying to do away with wetlands because they’re perceived as habitats for disease-carrying mosquitoes, she said. “That might have been the case at the turn of the century, when there were swamps, but certainly wetlands are fantastic tools we do not utilize nearly enough in Iowa,” Plasket said. “We need to use them more than we do; we need to use them to retrofit our tile drainage system in the state.

“It requires commitment, resoures and years to do that, but those two things would go a long way toward improving water quality,” she said.

Gaming tax fight

Additional money from the Environment First fund to monitor water quality in Iowa is further jeopardized because it is funded by gaming taxes. Racetracks with casinos are taxed at a higher rate than riverboats, an issue the U.S. Supreme Court will hear this summer. The racetrack executives have refused to settle the taxation dispute, a position that jeopardizes the state’s commitment to the environment, Vilsack and legislative leaders say.

“They are being unreasonable, and instead of working toward a solution that will solve the dispute that has already cost the state more than $24 million, they are demanding more from the state,” Vilsack, a Democrat, said in a statement. “Because of the gaming industry’s refusal to reach a fair compromise, the state of Iowa stands to run out of funding for the Environment First program and other initiatives, effective April 1, 2003.”

Senate President Mary Kramer, R-Clive, said Iowa’s water quality “will suffer serious damage” if the issue isn’t resolved, and House Speaker Christopher Rants, R-Sioux City, said water-quality monitoring and other programs may have to be shelved until the high court rules.