Evaluating watershed partnerships

Edited by Harry Huntley, Senior Agriculture Policy Analyst

I have the great pleasure of working on policy at all levels of government, from Farm Bill negotiations to first-in-the-nation state conservation programs to municipalities willing to try a new way of solving an old problem. 

This last category can be especially rewarding and enlightening. Local governments are frequently the closest to people’s day-to-day lives. In some ways, they can have the most flexibility, but in others they have concrete issues that they have to address, like balancing a budget.

Especially for small cities in the Midwest, meeting wastewater permit obligations really can be financially burdensome. But the solution is not to just throw up our hands and let rivers keep getting fouled and causing flooded downtowns. Creative solutions are needed that focus on what matters: getting nutrients out of waterways. When this can be done more cost-effectively by working upstream, of course they should be able to do that.

That philosophy is what drove the development of watershed partnerships. 

Over the past three years, EPIC and Sand County Foundation staff have collaborated with cities and state authorities across the Midwest to develop agreements that outline how point source dischargers of nitrogen and phosphorus can receive credit against their permits for nutrient reductions they finance on farms in their watersheds. Now, we’ve stepped back to evaluate the successes, challenges, and opportunities of those partnerships. 

Iowa in particular has made significant progress. To date, nine cities have signed these MOUs to create watershed partnerships. Millions of dollars have been spent by cities to reduce phosphorus and nitrogen entering their watershed in ways that can now be counted against the permit obligations for their wastewater plants; one city is spending $200,000 a year, and another has committed at least $4 million over the next 20 years. This flexibility has made it possible for cities to spread the cost of infrastructure improvements over a longer time frame by using nonpoint credits as a buffer. You can read all about each city’s successes in our progress report.

One of the minor challenges in Iowa was creating a system for the Iowa DNR to calculate the benefit of installed practices and approve those nutrient reductions as part of permit requirements. Accurate modeling is of the utmost importance, which we worked with cities to convey to IDNR. Recently, the Iowa DNR has finalized its system for validating credits and will soon have them all listed publicly. They had a backlog of over 500 “projects” (a practice on a field each year) and have worked through over 100 of these in just the past few months, encouraging cities that their investments are paying off.

There’s more work to be done, especially helping additional cities participate. To make that easier, we’ve developed a how-to guide and template MOU. As additional cities participate and develop new ways of generating credits, there will continue to be a role for a neutral third party (not the regulator or the regulated, nor for-profit credit suppliers) to provide technical assistance. The program could also expand to industrial permittees, which has not previously been tried.

Another focus state, Illinois, is behind Iowa’s pace. While we worked with a wastewater permittee and the Illinois EPA to submit a MOU, it has still not been approved over two years later. The Illinois EPA has a very regimented process for entering into any kind of agreement that makes it easy for something that’s not a top priority to fall through the cracks. And there’s now something of a chicken-and-egg problem in which the EPA would probably be spurred to approve the first MOU if more cities submitted agreements for approval, but the cities want to wait and see how the process goes for the first adopter. Moving forward in Illinois, will likely require a renewed push working more with one-the-ground relationships we’ve developed to recruit permittees, on-farm projects, and political champions.

A surprising success was to see Kansas adapt our Iowa template MOU to create their own version of watershed partnerships. Tom Stiles, Director of the Bureau of Water at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, developed a way for stormwater permittees to get credit for work conducted outside cities boundaries but in their watershed, typically in a way that protects their drinking water. He talks all about it in our interview together. To date, only one MOU has been signed, but more cities are planning to pursue it this year.

The crucial work of building relationships across political boundaries must continue. State and local governments can seriously benefit from the support of experts that can share best practices from across the state and the country. While this project has shown watershed partnerships to be a useful tool for addressing nonpoint source nutrient pollution, they have still only tackled a small portion of what the US EPA calls “the most widespread stressor impacting rivers and streams”. There’s still a lot of space to grow.