When you turn your faucet on you get water. When you need water you have it. Water is such a simple, but necessary aspect to our lives and people usually rarely think about it. For some people though, water is their life. Today we met some people that water was their life because we went to the Des Moines water works, and this utility provides fresh drinking water to over 500,000 people. Now if you were a farmer or lived in the Des Moines area this would mean a lot more then the average person because the Des Moines Water Works recently filled a lawsuit against drainage districts in three counties that are in the water shed that provides water for them. Before I explain the lawsuit there are a few things to know. In Iowa a lot of farms use tiles that help remove water from the farmland, and then these tile systems are connected to a common outlet. These systems are governed and managed by drainage districts. Now these drainage are not regulated under the Clean Water Act, but the Des Moines water works believes that they should be because of the large amounts of nitrates that are being released by these drainage districts. These large amounts of nitrates makes the water works run expensive systems to remove nitrates, and this recently hit a tipping point for them. This caused a huge controversy, and many people took sides. After a federal judge issued summary judgment against the Water Waters, the utility’s Board decided not to pursue its lawsuit further because of political pressures.

Now our meeting there was very impressive because we got to meet with Bill Stowe, who is the head of the Des Moines Water Works. Not only did we get to learn all about how the city of Des Moines gets fresh water, but we got to hear form the person in charge that filled this highly controversial lawsuit. Now we had heard a lot about this lawsuit from farmers that obviously didn’t like it. When talking to Mr. Stowe we heard a different sort of story. He told us a story of how the farmers’ run off was causing extremely high levels of nitrates, and this was causing them to have to run expensive machinery. Now at first I was very much on the side of the Des Moines Water Works, but after talking with Mr. Stowe I was less so on its side. This was because to me it seemed that there was no reason for the lawsuit in the first place.

I didn’t see it as necessary because I am still not convinced that there is an actual problem for the Des Moines Water Works. The first thing is that it is not a problem for them to get the nitrates out of the water. They use a complex system that removes all the nitrates, and this is blended with other water to achieve the proper amounts of nitrates. Last year this system cost a total of 1.5 million dollars to run, which translates to 3 dollars per customer for last year. To me this does not seem like a large cost, so then there is the other idea that there doing it for the environmental benefits. I also didn’t agree with this one for a few reasons. The biggest one is that the nitrates that the plant removes are all just added back into the river down stream. The Des Moines water works has a permit to do this, but if you want to regulate the farmers for putting nitrates in the water, then I think that putting those same nitrates back in the water shows that you don’t really care about the water quality. The final problem with the lawsuit that I had is that the Water Works framed it as an use versus them mentality. They talked about it only in terms of the rural farmers and then the people that lived in the suburbs, and no mutual understanding to fix the problem. Obviously I think that there is a problem with the amount of nitrates in the water, but I disagree with how the Des Moines Water Works went about trying to fix it, and I disagree with its position from which they filled the lawsuit.