Does the new antidegradation rule in Iowa mean anything for the West?

Well, yes, I think it does. Or it could. Western river advocates can learn a lot from the in-depth work done by your Midwestern counter-parts on Iowa's new antidegradation rules. While not perfect, Iowa's new approach avoids some of the most egregious problems found in other state rules and provides more detailed thinking about how to make antidegradation work in practice than the vast majority of state rules.

Side note: If you don't know much about antidegradation, this post will make a lot more sense if you check out the section on antidegradation in our online Clean Water Act course.

Finalized in early 2010, the new rules were approved by U.S. EPA last week, and then immediately challenged by the Farm Bureau and others (see this blog posting for a discussion of the arguments and a link to the petition). Iowa updated its antidegradation policy and created an implementation procedure, which was incorporated into the rules by reference. The really interesting pieces are largely in the Iowa Antidegradation Implementation Procedure. In brief, here are just a few highlights:

• Iowa has no -- zero -- de minimus or insignificance test. While many states exempt discharges that cause a 10 or 20 percent (or more) reduction in assimilative capacity from antidegradation review, the new Iowa rule has no such exemption.
• Iowa uses the pollutant-by-pollutant approach. While U.S. EPA has allowed states to apply antidegradation either using the waterbody approach (which assigns levels of review to entire waterbodies) or the pollutant approach (which assigns a level of review based on each pollutant individually), Iowa embraced the better of the two -- the pollutant approach.
• Iowa includes information about nomination, review and protection of Outstanding National Resource Waters aka Tier 3 waters, as well as Outstanding Iowa Waters aka Tier 2.5 waters.
• Iowa describes the required alternatives analysis and socio-economic test in some detail. This isn't a wholesale endorsement of their approach, but they clearly wrestled with the big issues.
• Iowa at least attempts to deal with the tricky issues of applying antidegradation reviews to general permits, stormwater permits and 401 water quality certifications. Again, not a wholesale endorsement but the policy includes some good food for thought.

So should Westerners care? We should indeed. Many western states are -- or should be -- wrestling with their own antidegradation policies and implementation issues. Western river lovers should read the Iowa Antidegradation Implementation Procedure and yes I said yes I will Yes. " as some of the newest thinking out in the world on the issue, and see how it might apply at home.