A Question of Quality - Jay Gilbertson Part 3

Hosts: Travis Entenman & Lori Walsh
Guest: Jay Gilbertson, Manager of East Dakota Water Development District

Episode Summary

This episode of Rivers and Rangelands delves into the Big Sioux River watershed’s water quality and management, featuring an in-depth conversation with Jay Gilbertson of the East Dakota Water Development District. Hosts Lori Walsh and Travis Entenman explore the challenges of maintaining water quality, including the presence of E. coli and other contaminants that have impaired segments of the river for both recreation and aquatic life.

Gilbertson highlights the importance of regular water sampling, the role of voluntary community programs, and how collaborative efforts have reduced, but not fully resolved, water quality issues over the last decade. The discussion also examines the differences between Western and Eastern water laws, the limitations imposed by state regulations, and the lack of trend analysis in official state reports despite evident long-term progress.

The conversation underscores the aspirational goal of making the river swimmable and stresses the need for community awareness and proactive, science-based measures to protect water resources for future generations.

About the Show

Rivers & Rangelands explores conservation, water, and community in the Northern Great Plains. Hosted by Travis Entenman and Lori Walsh, the podcast asks big questions about how we care for our land and water — today and for generations to come.

🎶 Special thanks to Jami Lynn for providing the music for this episode. You can explore more of her music here: jamilynnsd.com

👉 Follow Friends of the Big Sioux River for more episodes, updates, and ways to get involved.

👉👉  And to hear more from Lori, follow So Much Sunlight, a newsletter of essays, poetry, and audio ephemera on Substack!

Transcript

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So if you're going to swim in the river, it's not going to kill you immediately. If you put your foot immediately, it starts to smoke. I'm so comforted toxic, toxic waste sort of fire. Yeah, it's not, it's not on fire. But you, yeah, you should know. You should know that. And it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world to if you kids are going to go swim in the river or splash around at Falls Park. Then when you get home, wash off. Take a take a shower, take a bath. Make sure that stuff is done. Welcome to rivers and rangelands, a podcast by me, Lori Walsh and Travis Entenman, journalist and a conservationist, getting together to ask some of those big questions about the Big Sioux River watershed and how we all think about not only where our water comes from, but where we are going as a community, and some of the decisions we make about what our expectations are for water quality? What do we hope for? For our water are the decisions we're making now, positive when it comes to water quality or negative, we allowed ourselves and the our local area to become what it is, and that could be what we want. You know, when it comes to the Big Sioux River. Maybe we are okay with that, but it's important for us to ask our these questions of, do we want our wallet water quality to be what it is today? And if we don't, we need to start, you know, looking forward and putting into place what we can do to improve it long term. So again, this is this episode really goes into water quality and figuring out how we got here, where we're going, do we want to change, but getting into the weeds with an expert on the matter so we can really have an educated conversation around these topics. Yeah, that expert is Jay Gilbertson. He's the manager of East Dakota Water Development District out of Brookings. We met him up in Eagan in a lovely, quiet conference room there, next to the river, next to the river and the well, well head protection we drove protection area, a well head protection area, which is this grass where the water wells are, and a whole bunch of stuff You can't do there contaminate the wells, yeah, and a sign that says, So, nothing crazy. You Holy Cross. So Western water law covers South Dakota and who else, pretty much everybody to the west, Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, where you know the old waters, whiskeys for drinking waters for fighting sort of thing. Now go about 15 miles to the east of us here, into Minnesota. Then it is. It's more of an Eastern thing, where if you have access, I think it's called riparian, where if you have access to the water, then you can use it. And there's sort of an assumption there that there's plenty of water available. You just have to get to it. In the West, water is scarce, okay? And so they're a lot more picky about that, and nothing magical about the border, but the law changes, changes well. And there is, you know, South Dakota, I almost see as like a transition state too, because if you go to say Colorado, you know, I've read where cities like Fort Collins or Denver purchasing water rights from upstream right landowners. But you can't do that in South Dakota, so we're kind of, I said, No, I think you don't do that. I think, oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, Rapid City has, has done that. I know. I can think, and various other groups, you know, if you know, Gilbertson Farms has a, we got a water right to irrigate out of Rapid Creek. Yeah, 100 years ago, great grandpa got that deal, and we've made retained that we could transfer that to somebody else. Oh, okay, and you know, if a couple of bucks happened to change hands, so be it, you know, I was mistaken on that. Okay, so you can't get that, but it couldn't be like, you know, Bob's LLC, that's just hang on to it as a speculative venture, right? That's a little different story. Okay, and so, once you've got it, and so that becomes a pretty big deal, okay? Well. Um, and in our case, you know, when we transferred our rights to Lewis and Clark, or part of our holdings to Lewis and Clark, it wasn't so much that, I mean, they could have applied for a future use permit on Missouri river water. There's, there's still plenty of water in the Missouri to be had the interest there, though, was, we have a priority date that was, you know, 45 years older, sure you get it right in 2022 versus 1970 you got they wanted the date. They wanted the date. The date was the advantage. There was otherwise. There was no mean, the costs were all going to be the same so they could get it from us. Then they have an older date, and on the off chance, at some point down the line, things start to go sideways. They have an older they are senior to anybody who's come into play recently moved up in line. Do you could someone, is there a way for a person to lose their water, right? Just naturally, like, oh, yeah, yeah. In fact, I was at the water management board hearing just last week, and I'm, I don't, I'm trying to remember the context it was. It showed up in Bob Mercer's journal. Here he was sitting in the back of the room there were, every year, like irrigation permits you have, you've got to make your irrigation Well, you were required to report to water rights fill out a form. How much water did you use? When was when were you pumping it? Etc, etc. If you do not fill out the form, you can get a nasty letter, and if that doesn't trigger things, then the water management board can say, hey, look, when we gave you the right to use the public's resource, you agreed to tell us how much you were going to use and when it was being used. If you are not living up to your end of the bargain, guess what? We're going to pull it and do that. So that is possibility. And again, the requirements are, it has to be there. You can't interfere. Then there's reasonable use and public benefit. And so if you decide to just pump your water and dump it out on the road or switch from irrigating to simply watering the sidewalk. In theory, the state could say, Yeah, you are no longer there's no public benefit to what you're doing. We're going to take that right back and potentially give it to somebody else. Have all gone on. My lovers have all gone on to great things and in good health, family pictures in fog, which I inflict upon myself all my spoken Love is love. Now every pain every pedestal relinquished, I never dreamed it pushed me. Let's move on to water quality. Okay? And we started out our conversation with this significantly stack of papers. It's a Water Quality Report. What are our expectations for water quality? Is that a cultural question? Well, I think most people figure, if they turn on the tap, the water is good and they're right for the most part, you know, or that the water will, what comes out of the tap will be water that meets the specifications and requirements that the federal and or state government have set for public water supplies in South Dakota. The standards are, they're going to be the state requirements that are going to very much be mirror or mirror the federal requirements. In fact, there's a law in the books that says that South Dakota can't establish standards that are more stringent than federal versions. But, yeah, if you're getting water from a public supply, then it's okay to drink. No, it doesn't mean that water at every community tastes the same. And the water that comes out of the ground or the water that comes out of the river or the lake will have will start out having sometimes dramatically different chemistries. And so even if you treat it for the things that you have to treat it for it may still taste a little weird. You know, if you're used to drinking water at Eureka, local groundwater and you go somewhere else, you're going to notice a difference in taste. It's still safe by standards, but it may not be what you'd like it to be. It's like. Yeah, tastes like, and so, yeah, because the, again, the chemistry in a river, the chemistry in a lake, certainly, the chemistry in the ground, you know, the flow. Come back to the flaming fountain we talked about earlier that, you know, it's wet, that's, you know, and if you got nothing else, I'll take it, but it's not going to taste very good, right? You know, it's been sitting in the ground groundwater. Typically, the longer it sits in the ground, the more opportunity the water has, to, say, pick up dissolved minerals, or dissolved minerals that are in the rocks that it's sitting in. And so you have a more minerally or harder, you get more stuff in the water again. Come back to the big sue the surface, sands and gravels. Rain falls, snow melts, it soaks into the ground. We pull it right back out again. It doesn't get a long time to interact with, with the ground itself. And so you're you're drinking better water if you've got water that entered the Dakota formation out in the Black Hills, and it slowly worked its way all the way across the state. And you pull it out of the ground here in the eastern side, it's gonna that's old water. That's old water. Now there's some old water that's very good, but in a general sense, the deeper you have to go, or the older the water is, the more it's going to be a little minerally to work with, and everything. Yeah, that would be it. No, if you have a private well, your own well, and again, which would be very common here in the Big Sur River Basin, if you're over the aquifer, I don't need to hook up to rural water. I have a well that works fine. Again there, it's going to taste like whatever the water tastes like. And it's up to the individual homeowner, business owner, to make sure that they protect the resource. You know, don't stack, you know, fertilizer, bags of fertilizer next to the well that could spill and soak into the ground, or make sure that the well itself is in good shape, so that even if it's protected at the you know, the you're not on sand, you're on clay that would protect the aquifer underneath. If, if the hole around the well pipe is open. It's a pathway, and stuff could fall in there and go there. And so it would behoove anyone who's got a private well to certainly have it checked on a regular basis. Around here, we check for bacteria. Nitrates are a very common shallow walk for contaminant, just because fertilizer use is ramp, I mean, is everywhere, yeah, and that that's an issue. But if you're getting it from a public water supply, it should be good. But going along those lines, you know, as a community, obviously, yes, we should have an expectation that we have clean, safe drinking water. But, you know, surface water of the Big Sioux, right is, you know, we have issues with E coli, total suspended solids. You know, Mercury's becoming a bigger issue. What should our tolerance level be for contaminants like that? In your opinion, well, in a river or a lake or a stream, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. And the integrated report, we kind of wrap back to that. It's an interesting thing. One of the designated beneficial uses for water in South Dakota, surface surface waters are what is called immersion recreation, which is a fancy way of saying swimming. Can you swim in the water? And in order to evaluate whether or not that's the right thing to do, or that the water is supporting that beneficial use, the state has adopted criteria things they can measure in the water. And you know, if it, if it meets or exceeds this number, it's okay, or it's bad, or what have you in the case of the immersion, recreation, swimming, the two things, the primary measure is bacteria. We look at the amount of E coli bacteria in the water. That's a very general class of bacteria. We have E Coli in our guts right now, so it's not instantly fatal, but if you've got E coli present at levels in excess of certain numbers, then the that is considered problematic, and it's, it's more of a statistical sort of thing. If you have a bunch of E Coli in the water, the chances of having a few of the really bad ones are pretty good. You know, there's, there's E Coli in all the water, but, and it's not all the E coli that we. Need to worry about. It's it's certain ones. But the more you've got, the better your chances of having some bad stuff. And so if you want to swim in the water, then if you've got a lot of samples, it's 126 colony forming units per 100 milliliters. If you don't have very many samples, it's 235 colony forming units in 100 mills. Yeah, that's how we evaluate. And if in the integrated report, it will tell us that the Big Sioux River, as it flows out of moody County, basically below moody County, that immersion recreation is a designated use. And so we when we take samples of the Big Sur ever at Del rapids, we're looking at the E coli concentration. And if it comes back greater than 235 it would be considered a black mark, a fail on that. And by and large, the river below del rapids, the parts of the river that are designated for immersion recreation, I've put it that way, sure have been considered impaired, non supporting for pretty much as long as we've been taking samples. So if you're going to swim in the river, you know it's not going to kill you immediately. If you put your foot immediately, it starts to smoke. I'm so comforted toxic, toxic waste sort of fire. Yeah, it's not, it's not on fire. But you Yeah, you should know. You should know that. And it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world to if you kids are going to go swim in the river or splash around at Falls Park. Then when you get home, wash off. Take a take a shower, take a bath. Make sure that stuff is done. The chances of E coli having been present are at high levels, is pretty good in those areas, if you aren't swimming, what we call limited contact recreation, which would be boating or canoeing, where fishing, where you put your hand in the water, but you're not putting your face, yeah, you're not immersing yourself in the water. Bacteria is used there, as well as one of the criteria to evaluate the numbers are quite a bit higher. I think the chronic is 600 or six or 700 colony forming units, the limited or the the more acute is about almost 1200 colony forming units. And again, for the most part, below Brookings, we tend to hit a fail on that as well. Yeah. Now the that's and that's and that's been pretty consistent. We look at the integrated reports back over the years. Now, one of the things that doesn't show up in the report, and this is something we've recognized, is that, because the report is of very much of a black and white, it's a binary report, pass, fail. You know, pass fail, 20 years ago, you know, we may have had 80% exceedance on our samples, and through efforts of the Big Sioux River Project, or friends of the Big Sioux or the NRCS programs to try and limit, limit bacterial inputs, those have been successful. I mean, every time you, you know, take a new feedlot offline, or upgrade a feedlot and keep things where, where everybody wants them to be, that reduces the load. But you know, if we're at 20% exceedance, that's a huge reduction, right from 80 in an environment that is 100% voluntary. That's a fantastic improvement, as far as integrated reports concerned, yeah, still unimpressed. I still can't swim in the river, right? That's so we have a goal by 2050 I mean, are there any, is there any aspiration to this? Or we're just continuingly to move in the direction, that's a good question. Yeah, that's a I would say they're probably more aspirational. I mean, that I used to Travis is former boss at Friends of the big Sue. An early slogan for the Friends of the big Sue was swimmable by 2025 it's 2025 now. And no, it's not swimmable yet, but it's getting better, and you have to do something sudden. We have dropped that little that little tidbits probably fallen off the wayside because that sounded. Really good in 2012 you know, 2024 No, the ideally, yeah, it's to get better every year. Well, but certainly part of the conversations that we've had, and I've been asked by legislators, who are asked, on occasion, you know, to provide funding to make the water better is, when's it going to get better? Because if the only real document that we have, the the easiest document to lay your hands on, and it's still not easy to find, is the integrated report, what the integrated report would tell you is that we're not making any progress at all. It was because it's binary. It was, it was bad in 1998 and it's bad in 2024 What the heck? What are you doing? Can I have my money back? Right? Well, no, it's getting better, but, and you can show that and which is not in that report, yeah, if you dig right in the report, the report is written. The report is written to address a specific set of requirements that are found in the Clean Water Act. You know, list your water bodies, list the designated uses, list whether or not they support the designated use. That's it. It is not a requirement of the Clean Water Act that you provide, let's say a trend analysis. You know, yeah, it's bad. It's been bad all along, but it's not nearly as bad as it was. Does that does that report have a trend analysis? No, no, no. Trend now required, and this can go the trend analysis exist? Well, friends of the big Sue have put one together, but to Jay's point, is based off of the integrated report, which does not have that nuance easily accessible. Okay, so, so the trend analysis isn't as nuanced as it could be as well, because it's using those top line numbers, right? You said it's getting better. How do you know? Well, we've, we've done the trend analysis. I mean, we've got, you know, in our case, we've got access well and as friends in the big zoo. But I mean the water as a water development district, I mean East Dakota, one of the things we do is we collect a lot of water samples. That's something we were involved in the initial assessment of the Big Sioux River 20 plus years ago, and we've just stuck with that and augmenting. I mean, the state has a network of water quality monitoring stations, and much like the naming convention, wqm, water quality monitoring, let's go with that 150 W, Q, M sites across the state, which they will go out and collect samples on a quarterly basis or a monthly basis, or depending on the situation. We would like more information for our big water body, which is the Big Sioux River. So in addition, we go out and collect more samples at their stations, and we've established a whole bunch of our own monitoring stations. And so if we want to look at how are things going over time, we can pull the data out of our own files, and the state information is also available online. And so you can, you could plot that say, you know, here's all the bacteria data from 2020 and here's all the bacteria data for 2021 or here's the range of things. And if you, if you do that, what you generally, what we have found in areas where the watershed restoration and protection activities have been implemented, we can see definite trends over time of the water getting better, of the number of exceedances going down, but that is not something that shows up in the integrated report. The state does not have a goal, and the state could, I want to go back to something you said about the state cannot pass a law that is more stringent than the EPA. So in some ways the state, it would be impractical for the state to have some kind of goal, because it's possible for the EPA to say, no, your water is too clean. That would not make any sense, but you see where my logic is going there? Because, I mean, this is South Dakota, and we tend to take a viewpoint that regulation is not a good thing, okay, even if it's to our own benefit, right? I think it's good. You think it's better that I think it's good. The two of you think it's bad, well, it's bad. And there's a whole lot of people that think regulation is bad, period. And so in that environment, it's kind of tough. And one manifestation of that is, again, the code, and I don't have the number. My fingertips that basically says that the state cannot adopt an environmental standard that is more stringent than a comparable federal standard. So if there is like in the case of nitrate in drinking water, the magic number is 10 parts per million or 10 milligrams per liter of nitrate in the water. South Dakota could not the D, an r, d, an R, could not say, Well, we think it eight is a better number, or five is a better number. It provides greater protection to our citizens. We would have to change state law in order to do what we might think would be a better thing for our people. EPA is not going to come in and say, no, no, no, no, you can't do that. So it's us. It's, this is a local Yeah, this is a South Dakota decision not to get out in front of the feds. Okay? And conceptually, yeah, it's a little difficult federal standards, you know, if you've got a federal standard that is intended to apply, from San Diego to Bangor Maine, from Key West to, you know, Point Barrow, Alaska, you know, concept, those are going to be pretty general. Lowest common denominator, standard Big Tent regulation. Big Tent regulation. We said we want every body of water in the beautiful state of South Dakota to be swimmable, right? We would like it, yeah, we would like it to be better. We could voluntarily do that. We could not pass a law, a state law, right now, a bunch of regulations, we'd have to change that conceptually from a legislative standpoint, which is incredibly unlikely, perhaps even absurd, to think that that in an era that we don't really trust regulation, that that would all of a sudden happen, yeah, so most of it's voluntary. We could do stuff where we pass laws around certain management practices that would inadvertently help water quality. Yeah, right, that we could. We couldn't set a new water quality standard, but we could pass we're not going to do programs in the place, so like the the Department of Ag and Natural Resources Dan ours, buffer initiative, that's a program to help water quality, but it's not setting a new standard. Yeah, we're gonna say, Yeah, you can't have you can't let your livestock wander into the river. We're gonna have more with Jay Gilbertson. He is the manager of East Dakota Water Development District out of Brookings. We met him in Eagan, and that was part three of a four part conversation, because he gave us just a lot of he was very generous with his time. We had a lot of questions, a lot of questions. After three hours sitting with him, you know you're gonna get a lot of info for a moment. We figured all of it was relevant and useful and needed for the public discourse, and so that's why we broke it out into four parts. And we really appreciate you taking the time to listen and hearing this episode around water quality and how we got here, and kind of the challenges we face. But now we're moving on to our part four, final part of Jay Gilbertson talking about water. There is no more water. There is no more water. We're using all of it. It's all designated for use. So we're going to start that next part with this idea of, if you want to build something new along the Big Sioux River watershed in the city of Sioux Falls, particularly, your water has to come from somewhere. You've got to bring it with you, or move to Chamberlain. That's what we figured out. So we're really excited. This is going to be a great episode. So follow along, like subscribe and all your favorite podcast platforms. Follow along at the big we're friends of the Big Sioux River. We'll have the social and newsletters going out talking about new episodes and teaser episodes. So just keep following along. And like always, we really appreciate all the response and the listening and the encouragement, and it means the world. So thank you, and we really appreciate Jamie Lynn for helping provide music for season one of rivers and range lands. Thanks. All right. Episode Two, thanks for listening. Or that was three. Was that three? That was two? Well, it's episode three, but it's part part two. Part two of Yeah, we got we harmed ourselves in a way, probably not. I don't want to say that. Say it again, but different, we allowed ourselves. You.