The Des Moines River in downtown Des Moines on Oct. 21, 2025. (Photo by Cami Koons/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
Polk County supervisors voted Tuesday to invest $200,000 to keep water quality monitors functioning across the state — a move officials said they hope other counties will mirror.
The funding will help a University of Iowa-headed monitoring system that was set to end in summer 2026 due to a lapse in funding. Polk County officials said the data provided by the system is “vital” to the state as it implements different practices to improve water quality.
The Iowa Water Quality Information System, or IWQIS, provides real-time measurements of pH, nitrate, dissolved oxygen, discharge rates and temperature at about 80 locations in streams across the state.
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Funding for the program, which is run by researchers at the University of Iowa’s IIHR Hydroscience and Engineering department, was diverted in 2023 via state legislation. The Walton Family Foundation temporarily sustained the system, but that money is set to run out in summer 2026.
Matt McCoy, a Polk County supervisor, said Tuesday the $200,000 from the county will kick in after existing funds run out in June 2026. McCoy said this gives other counties, namely Linn and Johnson, time to “decide if they can participate” in the funding. McCoy said he “will bet” the other counties will find it important to participate.
“I think we have an obligation as county government to make sure that we’re ensuring that the water that our residents are drinking is protected,” McCoy said. “So I think that’s our role, and I think this is an appropriate allocation of resources.”
According to the county, the monitoring system needs $600,000 annually to be fully operational.
Importance of the sensors
Polk County has its own water quality improvement plans that focus on efforts in both urban and rural areas, according to John Swanson, the county’s water resources supervisor. The program builds wetlands, helps install saturated buffers, cover crops and similar initiatives. The monitoring data, he said, helps his team see the impact their initiative has on water quality.
“We want to build stuff … but to do that, we have to educate people,” Swanson said. “We need to keep looking at the data, keep using that data, to say we’re going to be most efficient with our projects.”
Richard Leopold, director of Polk County Conservation, said it’s also important, from a scientific standpoint, that the data remain continuous and not be interrupted by a lapse of funding. Consistent, unbroken data streams help researchers to identify trends and understand the impact new practices have on a system.
“We can’t have interruptions or it all falls apart,” Leopold said.
Public safety, according to McCoy, is at the “forefront” of the water monitoring. He noted that recent statistics listing Iowa as having some of the highest rates of cancers in the nation, leads people to ask “questions that require the types of data” collected by the UI monitoring system.
Adam Shriver, the director of wellness and nutrition policy at the Harkin Institute for Public Policy & Citizen Engagement applauded Polk County’s decision in a news release. Shriver said losing the monitoring network would have dealt a “major blow” when addressing the “public health crisis caused by Iowa’s worsening water quality.”
“The leadership Polk County has shown is inspiring – a model for how local and county governments can respond to the water-quality challenges that face Iowa,” Shriver said.
Counties step in, but hope the state will follow up
The funding from Polk County includes $90,000 that McCoy said was “unspent” funding at the end of the county’s Central Iowa Source Water Research Assessment, or CISWRA report. This two-year, $1 million endeavor pooled researchers to produce an unbiased and comprehensive study of water quality in the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers.
The study, released this summer, amid the first-ever lawn watering ban in Iowa due to excessive nitrate concentrations in source water rivers, found that nitrate problems are “predominately” found in Iowa, and at that least 80% of nitrate contamination is linked to agricultural operations.
Reporting from late August based on documents obtained from the county, indicated the funding left in the CISWRA budget had been “zeroed out” by Polk County staff.
A county spokesperson said in an email to Iowa Capital Dispatch in September, however, that more than 90% of the budget had been spent to pay researchers and other intended costs. The spokesperson said any remaining funds would be “dedicated to ongoing and new water quality initiatives in Polk County.”
When asked about the CISWRA budget Tuesday, McCoy said supervisors wanted to put the remaining funds to “good use” and decided there was “no better use than collecting this data and funding this sensor project in the state of Iowa.”
Larry Weber, director of hydroscience and engineering in the College of Engineering at UI, commended the Polk County decision. He said it seemed “logical” Polk County would be the first to “step up” to help fund the monitoring system given the CISWRA report and water curtailment during the summer.
“We think that this is vitally important that we keep a decade-long program of water quality monitoring going,” Weber said. “Water quality is an important issue in our state and certainly has shown signs over that period of degrading, so I think it’s really important that we keep this network up and running.”
Weber said he has reached out to officials in Linn and Johnson counties, and has several meetings scheduled, but otherwise does not know the status of other county decisions to support the monitors.
The rest of the Polk County funding, about $110,000, will come from American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, funding the county received and had earmarked for water quality.
McCoy said it would be a policy discussion for the board in the future to decide if the county will continue contributing to the fund. But, he said, asking the state Legislature to restore the funding in its budget is at the “top of (the county’s) lobbying list” for the upcoming legislative session.
“I’d like to see federal and state funding for this, or at least some type of partnership going forward, because this is vital work,” McCoy said. “What the University of Iowa is putting out is world renowned.”
Polk County isn’t the only group interested in restoring the censors. The Izaak Walton League of America’s Iowa division launched a crowd-source funding campaign in September with a goal of raising $500,000 for the sensors. The half a million dollars would be enough to run the network at its most “basic capacity” but the group, and Polk County officials, said a $600,000 budget would allow the system to operate all of its sensors and make some equipment upgrades.
As of Tuesday, the Izaak Walton League fundraiser had gathered more than $15,000 for the cause.
McCoy said the effort demonstrates that residents are “very interested in being involved” in water quality improvement efforts.
“The idea is that all of us can do something to make an effort to try to improve our water system and the quality of our water and for that matter, recreation and health in our state,” McCoy said. “And so we encourage anybody that wants to be involved to either participate through water monitoring or through writing a check or volunteering, if that’s something they can do.”
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