(This story originally appeared in the September 23, 2020 edition of the Cedar Rapids Gazette. It is no longer available in its original online form.)

On a sunny, breezy morning on his farm in October, the fields on Richard Sloan’sfarm are covered in cut cornstalks and leftover soybean shells. In a few weeks, theyellows and grays will be covered in green.

Sloan, a farmer who runs an 800-acre row crop operation near Rowley in BuchananCounty, has implemented almost every water quality and conservation measureused by farmers today — from thick grassy buffer strips separating his crops fromnearby streams to wild prairie areas that attract wild animals looking for a habitat.Sloan, the president of the Lime Creek Watershed Improvement Association,believes agriculture and wildlife can coexist on the tens of thousands of farms thatdot Iowa’s landscape using expanded conservation funding, even as the agricultureeconomy faces one of its worst downturns since the 1980s farm crisis.

“It seems wrong to me that we come in and destroy all this habitat everywhere andthe creatures that lived here are driven away,” he said. “You don’t have to be ableeding heart about it, but still at the same time, why take that away from futuregenerations’ experience of what Iowa can be? What’s natural about that?”

Eight years ago, it seemed like the majority of the state agreed with him.

In 2010, 63 percent of the voters of Iowa endorsed creating a trust fund that wouldpay for a wide swath of environmental projects designed to clean pollutedwaterways, improve the state’s parks and preserves, and protect farmland fromerosion. They believed it was such a good idea that they agreed the fund, known asthe Natural Resources and Outdoor Recreation Trust Fund, should be enshrined inthe state Constitution with up to $180 million annually from a future sales taxincrease in permanent funding.

But in the eight years since, not a single penny has come in or out of the fund, asefforts to raise the state sales tax have stalled.

In the years since, Iowa’s waterways have continued to grow more polluted andincreasingly contribute to the hypoxia zone in the Gulf of Mexico, where nitrogenrunoff from farms in the Midwest grows algae blooms that consume oxygen thatother aquatic plants and animals need to survive. An April study from the Universityof Iowa says the annual rate of nitrates from Iowa has been above a baseline 2003level for the past 10 years.

That same study also estimates from 1999 to 2016, Iowa was responsible for, onaverage, 45 percent of all the nitrogen that flows into rivers in the Upper MississippiRiver Basin and 55 percent of the nitrogen owing into the Missouri River Basin. Thateventually makes its way into the Mississippi and into the hypoxia zone in the Gulf —raising questions as to how effective the state’s current nitrogen reductionstrategies are today.

Iowa farmers also have put more susceptible land to work over the past severalyears, partially in response to demand for ethanol and biodiesel created by theRenewable Fuel Standard. According to a September 2018 inventory from theNational Resources Conservation Service, a branch of the U.S. Department ofAgriculture, Iowa’s participation in the Conservation Reserve Program is estimatedto have fallen from just over 123,000 acres of prime farmland in 2007 to just over43,500 acres in 2015, the latest figures it reported. The Conservation ReserveProgram pays farm owners rent on highly erodible farmland to take it out ofproduction and to install protective measures on for the soil.

So, years after voters gave their blessing to the fund, why have lawmakers ignored it?

First, some historyIn 2006, the state Legislature set up a committee — with representatives fromagricultural groups, hunters, conservationists and state officials — to develop a wayfor the state to generate sustainable funding for natural resource protection. Theballot language, crafted with help from the state’s Legislative Services Agency, waswritten to reflect Iowa Code that gives voters the power to amend the stateConstitution, but leaving the authority to levy taxes to lawmakers.

In early 2010, state legislators passed the bill that later would form the ballotlanguage, 82-14, in the House and 49-1 in the Senate. Months later, voters gave theirblessing to the initiative.

Linda Kinman, a lobbyist for the Iowa Association of Water Agencies, was a boardmember of the Iowa Environmental Council on election night 2010. She said theboard was “enthused” about the possibility that the state could put more resourcestoward water quality projects in general, and later felt disappointment withlegislators who argued against the sales tax.

“It wasn’t just the environmental groups. The people of Iowa made a pretty strongstatement in support of it,” she said.

Statehouse efforts to raise the sales tax have stalled since then.

Three years later, state leaders endorsed the Nutrient Reduction Strategy, theframework to prevent fertilizer runoff getting into waterways across the state.If Iowa wants to hit the strategy’s goal of reducing fertilizer runoff by 45 percent, thestrategy estimates an upfront investment would range between $1.2 billion to $4billion, and between $77 million to $1.2 billion per year in operating costs.

Vague languageSeveral lawmakers have made the argument that the 2010 ballot measure onlyasked voters whether they wanted to establish the trust fund account but not if theyactually wanted the sales tax hike to go along with it.

State Sen. Ken Rozenboom, Republican from Oskaloosa, wrote in a guest opinioncolumn in the Des Moines Register in February that the language on the ballotdidn’t specifically mention a tax increase; the language was posted in full in polling places but not in the voting booths.

Rozenboom, also chairman of the Senate Natural Resources and EnvironmentCommittee, also had a problem with the language’s lack of specific projects, writing the fund would become a “slush fund” for vague projects and land acquisition.