Earlier this year, the Des Moines Water Works organization — which regulates water quality across Iowa — tried to sue three northern Iowa counties on the basis that farmers had been polluting rivers, causing the water Des Moines residents drink to be polluted. Des Moines Water Works has been effectively removing nitrates from Des Moines water, but at a cost to Des Moines citizens. 

Des Moines Water Works couldn’t shift payments for the cleanup of the Des Moines River to farmers who polluted it because Buena Vista, Calhoun and Sac counties aren’t directly related to Des Moines Water Works. They tried to sue the counties for an amount equivalent to what Des Moines taxpayers spent on cleanup. If the suit succeeded, it would have set a precedent that farms were under the same regulations as other polluters, such as factories.

The case was dismissed on the grounds that while taxpayers of polluting counties would usually pay for it, and strong evidence existed that central Iowa was owed damages, every citizen of these counties couldn’t legally pay damages for something only certain farms had done.

This has motivated Republicans to push highly unconventional legislation through the House that until last week had a surprising amount of momentum: dismantle the entire water works association and make regulating water quality something that each county can decide.  

Right now, Des Moines Water Works is a city-run company that provides Des Moines and surrounding cities with water.

Its operators are appointed by the mayor of Des Moines and approved by city councils of cities served by the organization. There are three subcommittees that regulate smaller sections of the central Iowa region, but a bill up for vote in the Iowa House of Representatives wants to completely decentralize the organization, requiring cities to have their own water control boards and be individually responsible for providing themselves with water.

Supporters of the bill tend to argue that doing this will give power to local governments. This is not intuitively a bad thing to say, but in reality, this is totally irrational. The way some Republicans are talking is as if there is a real, visible problem regarding the way Des Moines Water Works functions. There just isn’t.

The organization has been around for more than a hundred years and has been fine for the last century. Placing the important duty of providing water to citizens in cities with less collective funding would place more strain on each of Des Moines’ suburbs.

Just the act of providing clean water on a consistent basis to people is hard and expensive. During the last hundred years, towns have opted into the program because supplying water themselves proved risky and expensive. This is taking towns in a direction they desperately don’t want to go.

Motives behind the bill are important to understand. The representative who drafted the bill has received support from and been lobbied by those representing the three water districts where excessive pollution took place. Further, many supporters of the bill, both representatives voting for it and organizations lobbying for it are not in any way affected by actions of Des Moines Water Works, both in existence or destruction.

Though it has yet to be voted on, a representative last week was quoted saying the bill was “very much so alive.” Supporters still express confidence over its future success, and detractors are still voicing concern.

The representatives in favor of it also maintain that the lawsuit is irrelevant. But the bill was proposed shortly after the original suit was filed, and funding has recently come from lobbyists representing these people. Furthermore, the bill is so entirely useless and unexpected that it’s impossible to find how a well-informed congressperson could think this is a good idea.  

It seems at least very likely that this is more theatrics than politics, but the result is nonetheless that we are staring down real legislation with very real support for a bill that would uproot one of Iowa’s most essential services.