From KHOI, Ames, Iowa: County Residents Invest in Conservation for Future Generations in Iowa.
December 7, 2024, Pacifica Network’s Ursula Ruedenberg speaks with Environmentalist Pat Schlarbaum
Ursula Ruedenberg : During the recent election, voters in a county in Iowa voted on a bond issue called The Story County Water and Land legacy Bond. It is a $25 million initiative dedicated to enhancing water quality and habitat, river and stream buffers and improving parks and trails prior to the election. One could see many yard signs encouraging people to vote for this bond. Story County voters said yes and passed the bond by 77.75% – so almost 78%. It has been seen as a win for the environment.
With me is Pat Schlarbaum, an environmentalist. Pat worked for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources in wildlife diversity and wildlife habitat restoration. He was instrumental in repopulating the state with many animal species that had been considered extinct in Iowa, like Ospreys, Prairie Chickens, Bald Eagles, Peregrine Falcons, River Otters and many more. Thank you, Pat for stopping in to talk about the Story County, Water and Land Legacy Bond that was just voted in.
I wanted to ask you to explain this bond, but first, tell us a little bit about Story County. Where is Story County? What is the land like, and who are the people that are living here
Pat Schlarbaum: Story County is in central Iowa, just north of Des Moines. It was prairie land. The prairie root system sponges the water, so it was pretty much marsh land before the big steam shovels came through and channeled the shallow lakes to tile and get the water away. Water was almost treated like an enemy at one time!
Where there are vestiges of habitat and original oxbows in the rivers. Iowa is a beautiful land, but it has a lot devoted to agriculture. Story County is home to Iowa State University, so there’s been a lot of innovation with crop lands; it’s very productive, but it’s pretty much heavy industrialized agriculture, and those of us looking into the future are always concerned about our water quality.
Ursula Ruedenberg: Describe people in Iowa.
Pat Schlarbaum: There is a native community of the Meskwaki and a few of the Yankton, Sioux in northwest Iowa, but Iowa was laid open in the 1850s with a lot of immigrant traffic from Scandinavian countries and Germany, there is definitely an immigrant base.
Ursula Ruedenberg: The county’s culture is also dominated by Iowa State University. Would you say?
Pat Schlarbaum: Oh, yeah, it’s a very international school. Because it’s a science school, the world is represented at Iowa State University. Story County is also home to many of the large agribusiness corporations, Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, they’re all represented because this is an agriculturally based university.
Ursula Ruedenberg: So generally, if you drive outside of Ames, – the largest city where the university is – what you see is cornfields, right?
Pat Schlarbaum: Until you get to the rivers. All the wildlife are on these corridors of the riverine systems. So that’s where nature happens, next to the rivers.
Ursula Ruedenberg: Explain the Story County Water and Land, Legacy Bond. What did people vote for?
Pat Schlarbaum: They voted for a better future in conservation. It was designed to be a solid program that was going to provide water quality, recreational opportunities, and part of the recreational trails system. Iowa is really generating world class bicycle trails. They follow the abandoned railroad lines and it’s just charming that people can get out and experience Iowa in natural areas, because of those corridors that the railroad system provided. Public parks are a big part of it, and nature centers. People want to educate their children in conservation measures.
Ursula Ruedenberg: How is improving water quality and habitat going to look in Story County?
Pat Schlarbaum: There’ll be more terracing, more grassy waterways with buffer areas. Buffer areas are grasslands next to waterways. Grassland habitat is the greatest need of wildlife in Iowa. So there’ll be money to assist the farmer in transferring previously agricultural areas into grassland for wildlife habitat.
Ursula Ruedenberg: How does this actually work? Most of the rivers go through private property that belongs to farmers who are farming, usually as close as they can to the river, because land is of value for crops. How does a bond like this change that? How do you increase the grasslands?
Pat Schlarbaum: Federal programs will contribute money. There’s a Conservation Reserve Program for buffers, and then there’ll be matching money here in Story County.
Ursula Ruedenberg What actually happens? Because what you’re looking at is: land that belongs to farmers who make money on that land. So how do these programs change the formula for the farmers?
Pat Schlarbaum: There’s a baseline that they utilize for the value of property, and they give points for the projects, and the more important the project, is the more money the farmer can be granted in payment. He may decide, “I can make $5000 an acre with corn,” so they have to generate that type of funding to where he’ll look at it and say, “Okay, I can afford to put it in grassland then.”
Ursula Ruedenberg: So you’re saying that the federal money and this bond money would pay farmers to turn it into grasslands instead of use it for growing corn.
Pat Schlarbaum: That’s basically what I’m saying. That there will be money available to assist farmers to take the land out of production. These types of programs have existed since the 1980s and they’ve been shown to be very beneficial.
Ursula Ruedenberg: What do voters end up paying for this initiative?
Pat Schlarbaum: People are going to pay about $2.30 a month, or $36 a year. Property tax is where that money will be generated. It’s a bond issue, so after 20 years, the property taxes will go down.
Ursula Ruedenberg: The increase in taxes is for a 20 year period, and then it stops, right?
Pat Schlarbaum: Yes, and since we are talking about the money aspect of this in conservation measures, there’s always matching funds, so this $25 million will be leveraged into $60 or $75 million worth for conservation measures over time. So, it’s always a wise investment.
And they did have a master plan. This was not to be overlooked, because they targeted where the money was going to be spent. It wasn’t just going to go into some black hole. All the voters realized that these areas of trails and facilities and public parks and water quality, were going to be addressed with this bond.
Ursula Ruedenberg: Okay, so why was this bill introduced? Give us a little bit of background of this issue in Iowa – investing in water and habitat.
Pat Schlarbaum: Yeah, there was a statewide referendum that passed two sessions of our legislature in 2009 and 2010 and was passed resoundedly by the Iowa voters. In 2010 they were going to raise the sales tax one cent, and 3/8 of that increase was to go to the Iowa water and land legacy, and it was going to generate $200 million to start in 2010. We don’t know what it would do, now with increased value.
That referendum passed by – I think it was 63% – of the Iowa voters in 2010. But the governor said, “I don’t think people realize what they were voting for,” and stifled it in 2010. And it’s been stifled ever since. Nobody wants to raise taxes. Nobody wants to be creative, because 5/8 of that would be available for some other issues.
Ursula Ruedenberg: When you say nobody wants to raise taxes, you’re talking about the legislature. It’s interesting, when I came back to Iowa in 2011 and you could see yard signs saying, “Tax me!” and I was wondering, what was that sign about? And then I learned that that sign was referring to that conservation tax that was not being implemented.
Pat Schlarbaum: The political will has not been there to increase taxes.
Ursula Ruedenberg: So this bond in Story County was an act of taking matters into their own hands, locally, to do what the state wouldn’t do. Is there any chance that the state can stop the county from proceeding with this?
Pat Schlarbaum: Well, I don’t think so. I think local control would trump any sort of state legislation. I don’t foresee anything in that regard.
Ursula Ruedenberg: So this is a case where one county took matters into their own hands.
Pat Schlarbaum: Yeah, there were two other counties, Polk County in Des Moines and Johnson County and Iowa City. They both have $50 million bond issues. Polk County had two now, so they’re supplementing these programs. The voters have decided that it’s worth it.
Ursula Ruedenberg: You mentioned Polk and Johnson County. Story County is a blue County, and Johnson and Polk County are both blue counties in a red state. This type of voting follows partisan lines.
Pat Schlarbaum: Yes it does, but there is a fourth County, Adams County, which is very rural, and they have a bond issue. It passed. So, there is an outlier; there is a red county that has gone along with this, because people in Iowa realize the need for conservation money.
Each county in Iowa has a county conservation board. It was Story County Conservation Board that determined what the citizens were wanting, and they came up with projects that would address those wants and needs. And it passed by 77% so the will of the people is really what’s being exhibited here.
What COVID really showed us was, as soon as things got dicey in the home fronts, natural areas were just inundated with people, going there for their solace and recharging their batteries, or whatever metaphor you want to use. It was so obvious, and it just goes to show that when you have natural areas that can be strengthening and rejuvenating, citizens in central Iowa county will respond. And people realize that Iowa has water quality issues.
Ursula Ruedenberg: Why does Iowa have water issues? What are the problems with Iowa water?
Pat Schlarbaum: The main problem is the fact that we’ve channeled and did everything we could to get the water off the landscape, and in that process, there’s leaching of nitrate fertilizers into the water. In an area that’s devoted to agriculture, you’re going to have water quality issues, because it’s so all encompassing.
But people in Iowa are aware that there’s a fishing industry in the Gulf of Mexico that is being severely diminished because of water quality. It’s been shown that the nitrates, the fertilizers, are coming from Illinois, Iowa, and it’s creating a dead zone in the Gulf. It was the director of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, Paul Johnson, who was the first to coin that term “hypoxic zone” that I heard in about 2004. They knew it then, and we know it now – that our agricultural interests are being heavy handed on the shrimp industry in the Gulf. It’s like, “Well, how about those folks, you know?” And so I think people in Iowa realize that there needs to be more done, in water quality issues.
Ursula Ruedenberg: Okay, well, thank you, Pat. Before you go, just want to ask you a little bit about yourself. You grew up as a farmer and you ended up working in wildlife diversity and habitat in Iowa. Tell us a little bit about what that means and how you think about that.
Pat Schlarbaum: Yeah, I had the pleasure of growing up in Southern Iowa, where things are not quite so agriculturally oriented. There are still a lot of habitats in Southern Iowa that are utilized by wildlife and people recreating in the landscape.
But yes, one of our early projects was River Otters because we thought: well, would they add to this water interest? And they have. It’s just been remarkable. There are otters now in all 99 counties.
Ursula Ruedenberg: If you sit by the side of a river for any length of time, an Otter will come and look at you, which is a very nice experience!
Pat Schlarbaum: It sounds like a personal experience there! Yeah, that does happen, kind of beyond our wildest expectations!
Pat Schlarbaum: So, a term that I’ll use cautiously, but there’s a resiliency in wildlife that we just previously didn’t realize. For instance, in 1985 when I embarked on a conservation career, there were four nesting Bald Eagles along the upper Mississippi River in Northeast Iowa. Now there’s over 400 and I think every county has documented bald eagle nesting. So how are we to take that? Things are fine, our national symbol is with us once again? But I also feel like every time I see an eagle, they want us to do more for conservation, because they just revel in life. Water is life, and a lot of the species we worked with all had a water connection.
But in the process of bringing the Peregrine Falcons back to the cliffs of Northeast Iowa – they were ravaged by DDT in the 1960s and wiped out – we included the Ho Chunk nation. The Ho Chunk helped us with the Peregrines and the Yankton people helped us with Ospreys. We would bring Ospreys from Minnesota and Wisconsin to Iowa, but they couldn’t fly yet, and we would feed them in such a way they didn’t associate humans with the food. And we would take care of them and supplement them as they were learning to fish. And we always had a Yankton chief blessing the work, turning those birds over to another power, if you will. He strengthened our fortitude to carry on, because their nation had been completely inundated. It’s like they’re on the other side of the Apocalypse, if you will, so we can learn from that. We knew enough to do the biology to bring the birds back, but we wanted to do it in such a way that future generations would honor and respect and take care of these species.
I hope future generations will realize that we need to have these birds with us from this generation to the next generation and forever. The Osprey just seem to be reveling in life! So, if you revel in life, you want to do more for that, you want to feed that. And if a bond issue of $25 million can assist in that work, bring it on! I think 78% of the voters in Story County got that message.
Ursula Ruedenberg: Okay, thank you, Pat Schlarbaum, for speaking with us about an investment in conservation that was made, by voters in one county, for future generations in Iowa..
Top Photo: Iowa barn by Ursula Ruedenberg.