Thought you would like an update on Iowa Water Quality Protections. But first a little background information …
Background…
The Clean Water Act states that the water quality in ALL waters of the nation should be protected, at a minimum, for aquatic life and recreational uses. After years of work, by the Iowa Environmental Council and its partners, to bring Iowa into compliance, Iowa passed new water quality standards in March 2006 which provided protections for aquatic life and recreational use in ALL 26,186 miles of perennial streams in Iowa (36 percent of the total stream miles in Iowa).
More after the jump …
However, in response, Iowa legislators also passed a law in 2006 that requires Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to conduct stream assessments (called UAAs) of all of the perennial streams prior to requiring any wastewater treatment plant to upgrade their treatment processes to meet the new water quality standards. Since 2006, the Iowa Environmental Council has monitored this arduous assessment process and encouraged community involvement to make sure streams that are used for recreation do not get unfairly downgraded and exempted from needed protections.
Because nearly 1000 river or stream segments (affecting over 400 wastewater treatment facilities) were scheduled to be assessed, the process was divided into four rounds.
The DNR makes recommendations after each round of UAAS and submits the recommendations to the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for approval.
Recent Action…
On June 29, 2010, the EPA completed their review of the first round of DNR recommendations, which the DNR submitted to EPA in August of 2008.
The 2008 submittal consisted of 385 stream segments. Even after making some changes in response to public comments, the DNR recommended that 281 (73%) of the segments be downgraded from A1/A3 primary contact recreation (full body contact recreations such as swimming, canoeing and kids play) to A2 secondary contact recreation (accidental or incidental contact with water such as fishing or boating). The EPA's review of the assessment information and the public comments resulted in approval of downgrades for only 98 (25%) of these 281 stream segments. The EPA disapproved 164 downgrades and deferred a final decision on 19 of the stream segments.
The EPA's reasons for disapproving the Iowa DNR recommendations to lower recreational use protections was based on comments from the public and the lack of sufficient justification for removal of primary contact recreation protections including documented stream depths capable of supporting swimming. Public comments that indicated that primary contact recreation is an attainable use were the main justification for EPA disapproving 61 of the proposed downgrades.
Citizen voices make a difference! (Iowa Environmental Council action alert volunteers helped with this process. Become an action alert volunteer.)