By Seth Boyes,
Approximately 50 people attended a presentation of the survey results on Thursday, Nov. 14 at Pulpit Rock Brewing Company in Decorah. (Photo by Seth Boyes)
Officials with the Winneshiek County Planning and Zoning Commission unveiled the results of a study aimed at identifying important natural and historic resources in the area. Data from the local survey was presented on Nov. 14 at Pulpit Rock Brewing Company in Decorah, and organizers said the public indicated some clear preferences for protecting the county’s water and air quality.
A survey several years in the making
Wendy Stevens, chair of the county’s P&Z commission, said the commission was tasked with developing regulations for frac-sand mining in 2015, amid concerns the industry was gaining traction in some regions. Stevens said, around that time, the Winneshiek County Board of Supervisors also requested the commission develop a potential overlay zone to protect valuable resources across the county.
The county already had overlays at that time to protect bluff land and public well water, according to Stevens, and the commission began developing a public survey to help identify other county resources residents valued. The commission began the first of what was to be a series of community meetings in March of 2020 — the COVID-19 pandemic reached Iowa within days and put those sessions on hold for more than two years.
Officials began their work anew in the fall of 2022, repeating the few public meetings they had been able to hold. Community members across the county were asked to mark areas on county maps which they felt represented important local resources — Stevens said many marked areas like the Turkey River and Lake Meyer. A team led by Rachel Brummel, an associate professor of environmental studies at Luther College, examined those results and developed general categories from the public’s various responses.
Organizers created a survey which was sent to area residents in 2023, asking them to rank those general categories. Stevens said officials mailed out 2,200 questionnaires — she said voter rolls were used to achieve an equal mix of residents from various areas of Winneshiek County, while also ensuring no more than one survey was sent to any given household. About 683 surveys were returned, which Stevens and Brummel said is higher than generally expected for such surveys.
“What that means is that people in Winneshiek County feel strongly about protecting natural resources, and they wanted their voices to be heard,” Stevens said.
The survey was also made available online, but those results were logged as a separate appendix in the final report. Brummel explained results from individuals who actively opt into a survey tend to be more polarized and can potentially shift the results — she later indicated the local online results followed that pattern.
Brummel’s researchers eventually tabulated the results and presented the community’s top six priorities last week.
The top responses
Water, air quality and farmland were the top three resources respondents felt were important, Brummel said, with public recreation spaces, natural geologic features and historic resources rounding out the bottom half of the results.
“Just because these were the lowest, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay attention to them,” Brummel said. “Everything was ranked highly, and we would expect that because these resources were chosen because the community had already identified them as important in the community meetings.”
Water saw the strongest response among survey respondents, Brummel said, with many participants noting the importance of drinking water and the region’s karst topography. Others discussed the impacts of agricultural practices on the community’s water — Brummel noted some respondents felt ag producers negatively impact water supplies, while others said they felt the ag industry received too much blame.
About 98 percent of the respondents said they agreed or strongly agreed water was an important local resource, and more than 97 percent said they feel a responsibility to protect local waters. Percentages declined as the survey asked more specific questions, such as whether local government officials should prioritize protecting a given resource, whether building on certain land should be limited to protect the resource and whether land use should be limited to protect that resource — a pattern which generally held across each of the six categories. However, at least 80 percent of the respondents were supportive of the hypothetical limits aimed at protecting local water sources.
The public’s opinion on the importance of local air quality was less than a percent behind the figures for local water sources, with several individuals citing confined animal feeding operations and gravel dust as contributors to local air quality issues.
Brummel said she was somewhat surprised to see air quality rank as high as it did, but she also pointed out the survey was conducted during the summer of 2023 — when smoke from Canadian wildfires was drifting across the Midwest.
“That is what people were breathing and thinking when they took that survey,” Brummel said. “To me, that doesn’t mean that this is not a valuable finding. To me, it actually shows how people can prioritize things when they see it being threatened in front of their face.”
Full article in the November 21 Decorah Leader.
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