To offset Steve King's amendment to halt the Army Corps from returning sediment to the Missouri River, we need letters to senators Harkin and Grassley.  Here is a good letter appearing in todays Register.  My letter to the editor has not appeared in either SC Journal or the Register.

Rep. Steve King is off base with his amendment to prohibit the Army Corps of Engineers from dumping sediment into the Missouri River. The sediment the Corps is putting in the river is not the same as agricultural runoff and will have little effect on nutrient reduction strategies Iowa recently enacted.
Sediment reduction from the upland on-farm soil and soil conservation practices is really a separate issue from concerns regarding Corps sediment dumping practices used to create congressionally authorized shallow water habitat.
Historically, very little sediment from the uplands reached the Missouri River because the land was protected by native prairie grasses. The Missouri River was appropriately named the "Big Muddy" mostly because of natural bank and bed erosion as the river twisted and turned its way to the Mississippi River. Some of this sediment continued down the Mississippi to the Gulf, where they helped to create coastal wetlands that protect the Louisiana coast from tropical storms.
This was until the Corps dammed the Missouri River in the Dakotas and Montana and channelized the river below Sioux City. The river below Gavins Point Dam near Yankton, S.D., now carries 80 percent less sediment than historical loads. Through the congressionally authorized "bank stabilization and navigation project" completed in the early 1970s, the Corps reduced the channel length by 120 miles and narrowed the channel width 50 percent to 70 percent. The reduction in channel length and width removed thousands of acres of shallow water habitat important to fish and wildlife, but it also had other consequences.
The shorter narrower channel caused significant channel degradation (approximately 14 feet at Sioux City), exposing infrastructure and loss of important coastal wetlands along the Louisiana coast. To straighten the channel, the Corps constructed hundreds of dikes and armored river banks to trap sediment that was bound for the Mississippi River and eventually the Gulf of Mexico.
Nutrient testing has shown that this trapped sediment that the Corps is now dumping into the river to help mitigate some of the lost habitat has much more natural levels of nutrients than soil eroding from most Iowa farm fields and is a small fraction of the total yearly sediment carried by the river.
Independent scientists have verified that sediments and nutrients derived from the Corps shallow water habitat construction activities has very little impact (less than 2.5 percent) on the Gulf hypoxia issues.
Rep. King also stated that sediment dumping by Corps would increase flood risks. In actuality, these projects increase the carrying capacity of the river by widening the channel, which can carry more water, helping reduce flood height.
King should ask a few more questions and do more research before proposing something that will not be in the interest of Iowans.
- Chris Larson, Atlantic



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