Local officials hold preliminary meeting on Black Hawk Creek partnership

Although concrete details were sparse, a consortium of state and local conservation officials expressed a mutual interest in establishing a water quality and flooding mitigation partnership for Black Hawk Creek during a meeting at the Grundy County Conservation Office in Morrison on Friday afternoon.
           
Former teacher Clark Porter of Waterloo, who is also a landowner in Grundy County, is heading the initiative, and a total of 14 attendees were on hand for the two-hour meeting. The Black Hawk Creek and its tributaries flow from western Grundy County to the Cedar River in Waterloo over a watershed that covers 217,043 acres, supplying water that ends up in the Waterloo/Cedar Falls area and eventually Cedar Rapids before emptying into the Mississippi River.
           
“I’ve always had one foot planted in each county,” Porter said. “It’s a stewardship issue, and there are a lot people in this county who have been on farms going on four and five generations. And I’m sure that they want their grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren to be farming land and enjoying the quality of life that we have here.”
           
Nutrient runoff and water quality have become hot topics as the state deals with the fallout from the failed Des Moines Water Works lawsuit against three rural Northwest Iowa counties that were accused of polluting the Raccoon River and costing the agency millions to remove nitrates from the water. 
 
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