I-o-waaaa Ramble

Two things about Iowa. Okay, maybe three.

First, the caucus process, to be charitable, is at best ludicrous and at worst anti-democratic. To be fair—which is one of the most abused concepts in the history of humanity—the process does make a lot of money every four years for the state, an anomaly population-wise, though these dollars hardly amount to more than a sloshing about in the ethanol subsidy bucket.

What caught my attention in the 24/7 Iowa news deluge was an article at Politco which proclaimed “How America’s Dullest City Got Cool”. While I suspect a lot of folks can offer a long list of challengers for this dubious distinction—being dull, that is—Des Moines’s turnaround has been dubbed worth noting by a number of news outlets, online and off. Short version is that Des Moines is hep, tech, and Chamber-of-Commerce excited about itself.

Good for them. Seriously.

But wait. There in the side bar “Des Moines by the Numbers” is an interesting numerical nugget. Between 2000-14, under-18 poverty in Metro Des Moines increased 114%, while in the US during the same timeframe the rate for that group increased 35%.

Now, to be fair, Des Moines is home to a significantly better educated population than the national average, is statistically much less homicidal, and is way shorter on commute time. The piece de résistance of this urban uptick though is the city’s $24 million worth of art in the Pappajohn Sculpture Park. Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of dough.

Like so many cities, Des Moines has nearly double the population in the metro area when adding in the burbs and adjoining towns. It is in the inner city, which is African-American overwhelmingly, that household income is barely more than half what it is for white households.

Added to the mix is a growing Hispanic population that barely registered as a countable group in 1970 at 1.3% but reached 12% in 2010 and by some accounts is growing at 15% a year as the second largest ethnic group in the metro area (and in the state as well).

In a state that is approximately 91% white—and thus the anomaly—the state capital is about 24% non-white. So while Iowa is an outlier in several ways demographically, Des Moines seems a pretty representative metro area in 21^st America with inner city poor who are mostly African-American and a burgeoning Hispanic presence.

The other item that attracted my attention (and before Flint, by the way) is the water battle between Metro Des Moines and three rural counties. The issue in this throw down is nitrates in the water, and Des Moines says it will have to spend $80 million to update its nitrate removal system. The cost of doing that in 2013—removing nitrates—cost $900,000 according to the Des Moines Water Works. Currently, the situation is a lawsuit, warring factions in the state legislature, tepid Federal response, and farmers threatening to boycott the city.

Now the state budget is tangled in spending for nitrate abatement along with other matters such as education and infrastructure, and no one wants to sort out spending where it matters, on the bottom line.

But even more so, the pool fight between Mississippi and Memphis ratcheted up my interest in what may be at the center of territorial slugfests in our new century: Water.

Delta farmers in Mississippi via the state are suing Memphis again over an aquifer below their fields. Memphis maintains a we-drilled, we-pumped, we-have-the-right line of defense. At least the science seems consistent in the assessment that more water is being taken out than is being returned over time. Even I can do that kind of arithmetic.

Of course, the jurisdiction is state vs state and so the case would be Supreme Court worthy. At first, they refused to hear the matter in 2010, but now the court is allowing the $615 million lawsuit to go forward. And Arkansas is paying attention this time around as the aquifer is also under a portion of that state as well.

Nitrates. Aquifers. Or worse.

Wait until a state pulls a more localized version of the Blue Nile dam in Ethiopia and folks downstream start screaming.

Downstream. Just like downhill. We know how that flows.