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Pulling back the curtains on wage-theft enforcement in MN; Trump's latest attack is on RFK, Jr; NM LGBTQ+ equality group endorses 2024 'Rock Star' candidates; Michigan's youth justice reforms: Expanded diversion, no fees.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge will be challenging and expensive. An Alabama Democrat flips a state legislature seat and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman dies at 82.

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Public Input Sought for Iowa’s Proposed New Water Quality Rules

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Tuesday, December 9, 2008   

Okoboji, IA - How tough should Iowa's water laws be? The State Department of Natural Resources will be looking for answers when they hit the road this week with a series of statewide public comment meetings. The DNR is proposing new water regulations, called anti-degradation rules, to determine how protective the state's water quality laws should be.

Opponents fear the rules would increase business costs, but Susan Heathcote with the Iowa Environmental Council says business growth shouldn't come at the price of new pollution that would degrade the quality of Iowa's lakes, rivers and streams. She says anti-degradation rules are crucial.

"If that current quality is impaired, then we're going to work to restore the minimum standards, at least meet them. But where we have water that exceeds the minimum standards, we don't want to let that water quality decline. We call it 'keep the clean water clean.' That's really the simple goal of anti-degradation."

Jane Shuttleworth, an Okoboji resident who has coordinated the longest-running lake-monitoring project in the state, says anti-degradation rules are important, because water flows across political and jurisdictional boundaries.

"Right now we don't have a mechanism in place that allows us to communicate with each other until there's a problem that's already happening, and it's too late to do anything about it. So, this is what the anti-degradation process will do; it'll create a procedure and a structure for everybody to know what's going on and talk about what we want to do to protect our water."

Heathcote says you don't have to be a water expert to express concerns for strong water quality protections. The first meeting is Friday at 1 p.m. CST at the Wallace State Office Building in Des Moines. Other meetings will be held across the state this month and next; a list of locations is at iaenvironment.org




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