IOWA, USA — A petition from the Iowa Sierra Club filed with the EPA argues that Iowa has been violating the federal Clean Water Act for years.
Passed in 1972, the Clean Water Act aims to restore and preserve bodies of water by limiting the number of pollutants going into the water. The EPA is in charge of administering the Clean Water Act, but a lot of the responsibility of enforcing it is left up to individual states. In Iowa, the Department of Natural Resources oversees it.
The Iowa Sierra Club’s petition claims the Iowa DNR refuses to require concentrated animal feeding operations to get a permit. The permits are called National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, or NPDES, permits.
Under the Clean Water Act, the DNR is supposed to issue NPDES permits after facilities discharge pollutants into rivers and streams.
“The DNR is just perhaps imposing a penalty, perhaps not,” attorney Wally Taylor, who authored the petition, said. “They’ll say, ‘well do this work plan, so it won’t happen again,’ but there’s no assurance.”
The petition alleges that 467 factories, wastewater treatment plants and other discharge facilities in Iowa are operating with expired NPDES permits.
“The permits are supposed to be renewed every year to make sure they’re still accurate in terms of discharge that the facility might have,” Taylor said.
Under the Clean Water Act, the DNR is supposed to make a list of polluted bodies of water, so it can calculate a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) value. This value is essentially the maximum number of pollutants that can go into a body of water to still meet water quality standards.
The petition also claims the DNR does have a list of polluted bodies of water, but it is not coming up with the TMDL values.
“Those TMDLs are supposed to be the basis for cleaning up impaired waters,” Taylor said. “In Iowa, many of those impaired waters, there hasn’t been a TMDL prepared.”
Given these claims, the petition asks the EPA to revoke the state of Iowa's authority to administer and enforce the Clean Water Act, which concerns Eldon McAfee, an attorney with the Iowa Pork Producers Association.
“I don't believe the EPA would be nearly as familiar with those regulations, so I think it would cause a lot of confusion and a lot of extra work for producers with no environmental gain,” McAfee said.
The EPA is expected to give the Iowa Sierra Club a response on the next steps, but it's unclear when that will happen, Taylor said.
Local 5 did reach out to both the EPA and the DNR for comment. The EPA is working on preparing a statement, while a spokesperson for the DNR said they didn’t want to say anything until they had some time to review the petition.