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http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071224/NEWS/71224002

River fans fear Iowa will make waters less safe

Iowa kayakers, fishing enthusiasts and swimmers are trying to douse a move by state regulators to lessen protections for their favorite watering holes.

The move by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources to reclassify nearly 300 streams has drawn 1,200 comments, and the fight isn’t over. Iowans have until Jan.2 to weigh in after the department extended the comment period. The DNR then will consider changes to its proposals based on new evidence about how much the streams are used for recreation, said Adam Schnieders, a key staff member on the project.

The controversy is over different requirements for full-body contact and incidental contact with rivers.

Environmentalists say the state is violating the spirit of the Clean Water Act by diluting the very protections the state installed to meet the federal law.

Lower protections also can mean kayakers paddling along with feces and fish dying of chloride contamination, members of the Sierra Club and the Iowa Environmental Council say.

It is one of the biggest environmental battles in recent history, according to members of the organizations.

How aggressively the DNR protects these rivers, and how tightly it limits bacteria and other pollution, will affect the safety of swimmers, fishing enthusiasts and wading children. Environmental groups fought to force the state to offer the maximum protections for recreation, as required by the U.S. Clean Water Act, but they now contend the state is diluting the protections.

"Philosophically, it’s disturbing to me to realize that the DNR wants to downgrade the protection if we can’t produce hard evidence of people using the stream for recreation where they might ingest some water," said Larry Stone, a canoeist and avid outdoorsman from Elkader. "Our approach should be to do the best we can to clean up the water - not to see how many loopholes we can find to reduce protection. "

Schnieders said state water-quality workers have been surprised by the criticism, because the new classifications offer more protection, not less, than in the past. Most of the rivers had no protection for recreational activities before new rules were passed two years ago, he said.

The new standards will be used to set pollution limits in permits for sewage treatment plants, many of which will be required to disinfect sewage for the first time to cut bacteria in treated sewage sent into streams, Schnieders said.

The new standards are expected to require Iowa sewage plants to spend $752million to $960 million for equipment and systems to meet tighter limits on bacteria, ammonia and other pollutants.

That’s close to a billion dollars in projects to improve water quality over the next few years, Schnieders said. We took that as a positive.

The state’s one-sample bacteria standard for swimming is 235 colony-forming units of E.coli per 100 milliliters of water. Some of the treatment plants would be allowed to discharge water with 2,880 under some designations, Schnieders said. But previously, with no disinfection requirements, many could discharge as much as 993,750.

Schnieders added that the department has launched a review of Iowans use of streams at parks and other public areas after environmentalists claimed the state overlooked some places the streams are used.

This debate is over the first few hundred of 1,000 river stretches that could receive new classifications. More will come later. Schnieders said some streams, such as the Skunk River, have full protection after the state confirmed heavy recreational use.

Some river classifications are for full-body-contact recreation, the highest protection ; for incidental contact, while fishing, for example ; and for kids play, such as wading in an urban creek . State biologists say the protections for kids play are essentially the same as those for swimming. The controversy centers on the potential shift of some river stretches to the incidental-contact designation from the full-body-contact one.

In this first batch of reviews covering 4,475 river miles, 1,336 received the top rating, approximately 2,900 the second and 112 the third, Schnieders said.

Liz Garst, a member of the Iowa Natural Resource Commission, which oversees state parks and other state land, said the DNR's proposed changes are off base.

Looking at the map (of river designations), the 'kid’s play streams are only the biggest streams in Iowa, Garst told commission members and DNR staffers. To decide up front that no children can play in a stream in Iowa was appalling to me.

The rivers designed for kids in this assessment are rivers that are too big for kids to play in, Garst said. Playing in creeks is part of the natural resources of the state.

In 2006, the DNR began protecting 26,000 miles of streams for aquatic life and recreational uses, the DNR says. Before, 2,276 miles of streams were protected for higher recreational uses such as swimming, boating and wading. About 12,000 miles were protected so they would sustain fish and other aquatic life.

The move comes two years after the state - under heavy pressure and the threat of lawsuits from environmental groups - agreed to fully protect all of Iowa’s major rivers for recreation, unless studies showed that was impossible. For decades, the state had violated the Clean Water Act - in the opinion of environmental groups such as the Sierra Club - by refusing to fully protect some streams, unless data showed they should be protected. The Sierra Club and others said that approach was the opposite of what federal law requires.

However, the debate was not just about how many fish live in a stream, or whether bacteria counts are low enough to allow safe swimming. There was the question of how much Iowans water bills would jump as sewage treatment plants fought to meet the tighter limits.

The Iowa Legislature stepped in and required that the state, before using the new standards when setting permit limits, assess all streams to see if they are used for recreation and whether they could support it.

Other states have done that only sparingly and under very limited circumstances, said Steve Veysey, a Sierra Club representative and outdoorsman.

The analyses can be used to downgrade protections only if the state can show that recreation or aquatic life do not exist, have never existed since 1975, and can’t be supported through reasonable stream-improvement and pollution-fighting projects, Veysey said.

The DNR’s move is misguided, Veysey wrote in a letter to environmental-group representatives.

Earlier this month, DNR Director Richard Leopold told the Iowa Natural Resource Commission that the Legislature passed a flawed bill requiring the up-front reassessments.
"I thought the statute language requiring (the reassessments) on all perennial and perennial-pooled streams was unnecessary, expensive, divisive and generally not a good idea," Leopold said in an interview. "But the statute exists, and we are following through on the mandate."

The Clean Water Act does not require the reviews unless there is a new or expanded discharge into the stream - such as if there were a new business - but lawmakers required thousands of the checks before permits began reflecting the new standards, he said.

I’m confident we’ll get to the right place, but it’s a painful process, Leopold told resource commission members.

Reporter Perry Beeman can be reached at (515) 284-8538 or [log in to unmask]