Okoboji Protective Association

Spring, 2002

Dear OPA Members,

For nearly one hundred years the OPA has been a leader in efforts to protect the environmental quality of Lake West Okoboji. I am both humbled and honored to be selected to carry on this leadership as your new president for the next two years.

Many of you may know me from my summer work as a public education coordinator at Iowa Lakeside Lab, or through my efforts as volunteer coordinator for the Cooperative Lakes Area Monitoring Project (CLAMP), or because I often speak up at OPA meetings! These activities reflect my philosophy that water quality protection should be an integrative and collaborative effort. Traditional water protection efforts have tended to focus primarily on wetland restoration and other land use practices to reduce nutrient pollution into our lakes. The integrated approach, introduced nationwide since the 1990's builds and expands on traditional efforts by integrating water quality education, research, monitoring and strategic planning into water protection efforts. An integrated approach then, increases opportunity for increased collaboration and evaluation of on-going efforts.

The OPA has played a visionary and instrumental role in bringing an integrated approach to the Iowa Great Lakes region by:

• participating in the Clean Water Alliance: a coalition of over 60 agencies and organizations working together to increase coordination and avoid duplication of water protection efforts through long range planning.
• supporting the water quality research, monitoring and education activities of the Waitt Water Quality Lab, and
• helping to advocate the formation of the Dickinson County Water Quality Commission as a funding source for water quality improvement and protection efforts.

This is the kind of vision and leadership I hope to bring to my presidency for the next two years.

As your president, I have two major goals: to promote conservation strategies for urban development and to increase OPA membership.

My goal to push for urban conservation strategies is motivated by the result of Lakeside Lab's analysis of all available lake data on West Okoboji and the other Iowa Great Lakes. Despite the tremendous success of wetland restorations and other conservation agriculture efforts, the summarized data suggests nutrient levels have not dropped, but are either stable or continuing to increase. (Nutrient runoff is our number one water quality concern, for excess nutrients feed the algae blooms that cause taste and odor problems in drinking water, make the water undesirable for recreation, and degrade the ecological health of our lake.)

The current hypothesis for the lack of marked improvement, according to Dr. Arnold van der Valk, director of Lakeside Lab, and Orville Berg, Dickinson County Soil and Water Conservation District, is that increased runoff from rapid urban development since the 1970's has offset the accomplishments of conservation agriculture practices.

In response, I urge us to support a two-pronged approach. First, we need to collect comparative data between urban and agricultural runoff to understand the relative impact of these two major forms of pollution into our lake, and so we can best decide how/where to focus our attention and resources for water quality improvement. At the same time, we need to educate ourselves, neighbors, planners, engineers, zoning engineers and others about new innovations in urban planning that accommodate lake friendly development.

I am pleased to inform you that both of these efforts are being addressed. The newly formed Dickinson County Water Quality District approved a cost-sharing grant with Friends of Lakeside Lab and Iowa State University to purchase automatic sampling machines to collect such comparative agriculture/urban runoff data over a three year period. Such data will be useful not only to our lake, but other lakes in our watershed. Bravo!

Second, we have invited Wayne Peterson, Urban Runoff Specialist of the Iowa Soil and Water Conservation District to be our speaker at our annual meeting on Saturday, July 20 at 8:00 a.m. (Note: I had the date wrong in my membership letter!) Wayne is a good speaker and will give us some creative ideas about how we can minimize water quality impacts from urban runoff. In preparation for the meeting, I ask you to notice and think about where runoff from rainfall goes around your home and lakes area. Is it allowed to soak and filter into the ground, or does it feed directly into pipe or storm sewer that empties directly into the lake?

Finally, my goal is to expand our membership - with over 1000 homes surrounding our beautiful lake, we have only 300-some members! Now is the time to let your neighbors and friends know about the past and current accomplishments of the OPA, and how we can serve their interests to protect, preserve, and enhance our lake for today's and future generations. Invite them to our annual meeting, or to one of our First Friday OPA Coffee Hours this summer.

Jane Shuttleworth
President, OPA

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