Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not just in Iowa anymore!

A conversation about watershed partnerships in Kansas

Edited by Harry Huntley, Senior Agriculture Policy Analyst

What’s better than watching a good idea catch fire?

When EPIC and Sand County staff were asked to pass along one of our Iowa watershed partnership MOUs to a staffer in the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, we didn’t think much of it. But a few months later when that staffer, Tom Stiles, came back saying that the city of El Dorado and he had adapted the MOU to establish a watershed partnership in Kansas, we just about jumped for joy.

Tom is the Director of the Bureau of Water at KDHE and has a long history of looking across state lines for the best solutions to improve the health of Kansas’ waterways and its people, particularly in attacking nutrient reduction. We sat down with him to ask about his success in El Dorado, how it developed so quickly, and his plans for the future of watershed partnerships in Kansas.

Key points of interest in Kansas adoption of nonpoint source run-off program specifically for the nutrient of concern, phosphorus:

• Since the early 2000s, Kansas has made considerable progress on technological improvements for point source entities discharging nutrients. This has shown up in cleaner water at base flow and dry weather.

• However, in wet conditions and high flow, nonpoint source loading still needs addressing, especially when it directly impacts source water for many Kansas communities.

• Rather than developing a trading system for wastewater utilities, Kansas pressed forward with crediting permitted stormwater entities (MS4s) for deploying Best Management Practices out on the rural landscape. These are cheaper and have a more significant impact.

• To accomplish this regulatory crediting, Kansas borrowed the watershed partnerships agreement that has been used by 9 water management jurisdictions in Iowa.

• El Dorado, KS has used this approach to address nutrient and sediment loading in their Corps of Engineer water supply reservoir. They have partnered with the Soil & Water Outcomes Fund to supply and monitor phosphorus reduction outcomes.

• Wichita, Manhattan, and Lawrence are all similarly interested in creating this framework for investing in up-stream nonpoint source run-off reduction projects.

• KDHE plans to expand this model more broadly in the state in the coming year

Below is a transcript of the virtual interview with Tom Stiles, edited for concision, clarity, and completeness.

To start at the top, what does the regulatory environment for water quality permitting look like in Kansas? In Iowa, we're doing watershed partnerships for wastewater. What's the situation like in Kansas?

We've emphasized investment by our wastewater permit holders to reduce nutrients. And we've incorporated it as part of our anti-degradation policy. And we've used our total maximum daily load program (TMDL) program to establish waste load allocations that are then assigned to our point sources as well. So we've been pushing hard on the point source side, and I think at base flow and dry weather, I've seen improvement in terms of phosphorus, our “nutrient of choice.”

We figure that we've got nitrogen covered good enough for now. We haven't gone all in on trying to drive down total nitrogen. But phosphorus is a big issue for us; it's ubiquitous in our aquatic systems. We have only maybe just a handful of reservoirs that don't have high phosphorus leading to high chlorophyll numbers. Most of them essentially are pretty loaded with nutrients.

Before I get to the regulatory environment, just the overall landscape environment is that our kind of rule of thumb is dry weather and base flow is the responsibility of the point sources, while runoff is the responsibility of land use, nonpoint source, MS4 urban stormwater permits.

Back in 2000-ish or around there, EPA really pushed hard to use numeric criteria as the vehicle to achieve nutrient reductions. We watched what happened down in Florida where they spent millions of dollars getting the science right and then millions of dollars battling in court to get the criteria through. So, recognizing we know we’ve got too many nutrients, instead of chasing a number, let's just chase the impacts and just start pushing for reductions.

So we've embraced that framework that then charged the point sources to start working on reducing their nutrient output. And so a lot of them have invested in it, put in the technology to reduce nutrients. Of late we've had kind of a second wave of operators that are starting to learn about optimization and with what they have on hand–and maybe some of them with enhanced instrumentation and stuff–have been able to drive down nutrients as well. So we've got a one-two punch going.

So, base flow? Yeah, I think I see some improvement there in terms of just ambient levels of phosphorus. But as soon as it rains, all bets are off. And that's the second part of our landscape influences; land use is just dominating everything.

Now for streams, we're still debating whether that matters or if it's here today, gone tomorrow and we don't care. For our reservoirs, it doesn't matter if nutrients trickle in or come in in one gush, the reservoir holds it. And so we're refining some of that regulatory framework to recognize that.

But at the end of the day, because Iowa and Kansas, and even then extending up to Illinois, Wisconsin–the whole Midwest–heavy agriculture land use is dictating a lot. And our ability to utilize the nonpoint source programs–whether it's the 319 grant program or it's state or farm bill conservation programs through NRCS–kind of just scratches the surface and has always been very hit or miss.

So, that’s the baseline. Then, how’d you go about looking at new solutions?

We've had wastewater facilities come to us and say, “Hey, would you entertain nutrient trading?” And we said, “No.” We said that we don't believe that they have verifiable reductions on nonpoint that equate to what would have been put out by improved wastewater treatment. Nonpoint source phosphorus tends to be tied to sediment, so it's not all that biologically available. What comes out of a mechanical treatment plant is like pure sugar. I mean, it's orthophosphate so it’s very biologically available and so it gets taken up very quickly. So there's a kind of a conflict in that two different commodities are being offered up as trade.

And then also we worried that if a wastewater plant gets into a trade not only are they obligated to meet the conditions of their permit, they’re obligated to make sure whoever they’re trading with holds up their end, otherwise we’d have to go after the treatment plant on that. So you've got some regulatory vulnerability on that. So wastewater wise, no, we're not gonna entertain trading. But stormwater, that's different.

How so?

Stormwater just reflects wash off of the landscape and it doesn't really matter if it's urban or crop land; the raindrop doesn't care. It's just gonna move laterally out. The only difference is that for a lot of our cities, if it falls inside city limits, we're going to regulate it with the MS4 permits. But if it falls outside, we're trying to manage it with nonpoint source programs. So that's when we started saying, well, let's look at trading in a different perspective for that.

You get very low environmental return on investment for stormwater mitigation that goes on in the city. Rural BMPs are way cheaper than urban BMPs. So let's give MS4s that credit to allow them to work outside the city in a way that’s embodied within the permit. That's where we took the Iowa MOUs and framed them to basically be the vehicle to understand the relationship of what was going on between the wastewater side, the MS4 side, and the nonpoint side.

So this experiment is trying to prove the concept that it's going to be a more effective way for us from the watershed’s perspective to reduce nutrients, because it essentially creates an additional revenue stream to be directed toward nonpoint source and ag producers to do that. And with the benefit of it being focused on specific watersheds that are shared by the city.

So that's the regulatory environment. Nutrients have always been our highest priority. But we've been very nimble and flexible in how we set up the regulatory structure with that. And then taking the Iowa MOUs was a perfect way for us to basically create this new vehicle for managing nutrient loading on shared waters.

That's so great to have the full explanation. It sounds like you guys have been really thoughtful about how you chose to deploy your resources. Given that you work for the Department of Health and Environment, could you tell me about some of the impacts you've seen of excess nutrients in waterways on the people of your state?

Yeah, two surface water and one groundwater.

So on surface water, algae blooms–blue-green algae blooms–are very prevalent, not only in our reservoirs. Now also when we get rivers in slack low flow condition, we see blooms in the eddy pools. You can look at any of our rivers in the summertime and you can tell it's enriched just because it's got a green cast to it.

The algae blooms for us have of course been a challenge, but for once they’ve galvanized the public's attention on what water quality actually means. They don't necessarily understand numbers of nutrients, but they understand a beach closure or that they can't get out on their favorite lake.

Two: for our surface drinking water suppliers, all that organic material that’s created with nutrients as the fuel has to be treated out before they can distribute water to their citizens. And they see issues arise with byproducts of that disinfection process that they get called out on. They end up having to expend money and energy to try to knock down that indirect impact of excessive nutrients in their source water.

The third one is groundwater, and it's nitrates in the groundwater. We're just starting to introduce the notion of thinking of watersheds in 3D, putting the vertical component in as well. What's laid on the ground has just as good a chance of going vertically down to the aquifers as it does laterally to the stream systems. For us, yeah, we see a lot of our groundwater systems starting to battle nitrates that are going over the 10 mg/L limit. So that's I think the three health perspectives that engage our citizens, whether they realize it or not.

Do you remember how you originally heard about the watershed partnerships in Iowa?

Yeah, Adam Schnieders over in Iowa has been focused on solving the hard nutrient issues for years. He and I engage weekly, if not daily sometimes. And we've shared committee assignments on our national associations and stuff like that. So he and I have exchanged notes over the past 10, 15 years.

In fact, in 2005 or so, my predecessor and I went up to Des Moines and talked to the Iowa agency as well as some of the farm advocate groups there about the approach we were taking, which again was, let's knock off this talk about numeric criteria. Let's talk about load reduction as the vehicle for doing it. So Iowa took that and kind of spun up their program from that.

In talking with Adam, he was talking about Cedar Rapids and Ames, and that they had your memorandums that basically laid out their watershed partnerships. I said, “That would work perfectly for what I have in mind.” And so he had Todd get those to me and then we just customized them for our situation. So it was just an ongoing exchange between us and state government leaders to find the vehicles to be able to facilitate this process that I think is most pragmatic.

I can certainly appreciate that. I'm glad that you and Adam were talking. We really like getting to work with Adam, and he gets a lot of stuff done. So once you heard about it and you realized how perfect it was, how did you go about getting approval?

We went around again on the original notion of trade. We went and talked to Wisconsin a lot. From our eyes, if anyone has a successful trading apparatus, it would be Wisconsin. And they have numeric criteria in play there, but they're taking the step to say, well, here's the effective way to implement all that. So we went up and talked to Wisconsin DNR a lot on this stuff and grabbed some of that, but then also looked at what the Iowa situation was.

Recognizing again, our philosophy was that we weren't going to just open up the door for free trading, but we recognize with us, the MS4 program in the Midwest is almost an oxymoron. We joke that our cities are little urban islands in a sea of corn. So it doesn't make sense to just focus on what's happening in the island. We've got to look at the whole body of water, the whole watershed to understand what we might realize when it comes to nutrients.

So we grabbed from Wisconsin, we grabbed from Iowa, we looked a little bit at how Colorado had done some early nutrient strategies associated with some of the Front Range Reservoirs. And we pulled all that together and then we were approached by El Dorado, who had a very progressive utilities director that said I've got money in my war chest to go out and do some good stuff.

Tell me about El Dorado.

They are supplied by a Corps of Engineers reservoir kind of like how Des Moines is supplied by Saylorville, , but it's gotten prone to some nutrient loading. So they want to say we want to spend some money up in the watershed and I start thinking “Oh boy, this is serendipity.”

You've got outstanding performance as a wastewater plant, you've got an MS4 permit, you've got money that you're willing to spend, and you've got a place that potentially you can spend it on that will placate your citizens.

So El Dorado played ball with us and we brought in Soil and Water Outcomes Fund to provide the means of connecting into the private sector for credits. So we had a very nimble state apparatus. We had a willing partner on the local scene of a regulated utility to do it. And then we had the experience that came down from SWOF from what they had done up in Iowa. And we were able to then kind of bring all our forces together to try to accommodate that.

Are you seeing interest from other cities now?

We are now, you know, we're starting to see some interest elsewhere. The City of Manhattan, where K-State is, has kind of taken notice.

And the City of Wichita broke ground on this whole offsite implementation. They weren’t thinking about nutrients. They just were worried about sediment. And their driver was their developers not wanting to put in trash separators and all that, which cost a lot and inevitably fail after the first year. So we've worked with the city to set this approach up.

Manhattan's going to initiate with the Wichita approach first because they've got development pressures as well. But then they're going to morph over to the El Dorado model.

And we've got a couple of others. We're going to go to Lawrence and KU, which is going to be very environmentally with it as well and start having that conversation.

So we think that we've got a foothold now. And next year we've got to be able to try to broaden the level of interest to get some of this participation and build out our knowledge based on what works and what isn't working on this. We're pretty bullish on it.

Could you tell me about challenges you’ve faced in getting cities to adopt watershed partnerships?

One of our challenges with this concept is getting an MS4 to say, yeah, I'm going to take taxpayer money and then I'm going to spend it outside city limits. In this case, we overcame that by saying, well, yeah, you're putting it above the source of your drinking water. So it's source water protection.

So you're, you're not only satisfying your regulatory obligations, you're doing something to improve the condition of your source water. And so there's little nuances like that, but that's probably one of our biggest challenges: getting the urban stormwater managers to think outside city limits.

It sounds like you've got the right path to walk down and it's just a matter of a little more time to ramp it up.

Well, the other challenge as you probably know is that it doesn't matter if you come in with gold bullion, ag producers don't just jump right into your lap. They think about it a lot and they talk about it amongst themselves a lot before they want to tie in. We've seen this across the board with our 319 program, state conservation programs, and then NRCS. What we hear is that the reticence of ag producers to play ball with all those programs, is they're slow, they're too prescriptive, and they come with too many strings, including a lot of reporting. And they just go, “They’re all the same; I'll take a pass; there's nothing really in it for me.” So, we need new solutions like this.

Do you have any estimate of how much progress you've made in avoiding nutrients getting into these reservoirs?

Not yet. One of the nice things with using Soil and Water Outcomes Fund for El Dorado is that they'll do the monitoring, they'll do the modeling, and they'll generate–based on the practices put in on behest of the city–here's what the reductions are.

And we've told the city, “You take those numbers and you report them to us as your numbers for MS4.” So we won't know that until probably a year from now when we see the first initial report.

You look at performance in terms of outputs and outcomes. We do know that as far as outputs we've got 535 acres enrolled in this program there. SWOF is still going out beating the bushes trying to get more enrollment on that. And then outcomes we'll be looking at, well what do the monitoring and modeling data say. The MS4 doesn't have to do that work. They can just gravy train on it and treat it as if it’s their own.

We'll see what that looks like. Talk to me in a year. Talk to me in a year on both fronts, how much more enrollment we got and what we're seeing in terms of what we believe is the environmental return on investment.

I think you might have just given me the line to end the article with.

Yeah, talk to me again in a year from now.

You know, we're interested in seeing exactly what you're doing happening in more states. So, to close, do you have any advice for other states, particularly around how you were able to do this so quickly?

Just tell them it's okay to try. You got to try something, learn from it, then tweak it and try something else. That philosophy has got to get into our framework for addressing nutrients. We've got to try more stuff.