Sand has time to divine the truth about our water
From left: Tom Cullen, Art Cullen and Rob Sand at the Storm Lake Times Pilot office.
Rob Sand pines for the days when you could safely take a dip in the Upper Iowa River near Decorah. He is not so sure it is safe for his sons, 9 and 11, and that says a lot about the state of the state.
Not that Sand as a candidate for governor offers much what to do about it yet.
The Raccoon and Mississippi are listed as “endangered” by America’s Rivers. Iowa’s cancer rates are rising. You can smell it at the headwaters of Bloody Run trout stream not far from Decorah, where 11,000 cattle are just uphill, and in Saylorville Reservoir’s toxic algae blooms.
Sand says Bloody Run might be an isolated problem. He has 16 months until the 2026 election to bone up on this and other issues dear to Democrats as he seeks their nomination to run for governor in the 2026 midterms.
Gov. Kim Reynolds is not seeking re-election. Attorney General Brenna Bird says she will not run, and neither will House Speaker Pat Grassley. That leaves Rep. Randy Feenstra of Hull and others you have never heard of.
Sand has a chance to win. He has over $8 million, much of it from his wife’s family wealth drawn from the ag supply chain. It’s Iowa. We’re all pretty much invested in agriculture. Water scientist Chris Jones, formerly of the University of Iowa until he kept shouting the truth about pollution, is chattering about how the political elite in Iowa ignore how agri-industry is polluting our water. It irritates Sand. He says some ears can’t hear.
Our water is getting worse, not better. Storm Lake is running low and raising rates.
“It is a serious issue,” Sand said during an interview last week when he visited Storm Lake. He mentioned that manure digesters draw flak when they might improve water quality. Critics say digesters serve animal concentration that leads to more environmental problems.
“A lot of these positions are anti-agriculture,” Sand told me.
He said he talks about water quality all the time. Other than manure digesters, he demurred when I asked about solutions. He waves off “broad assertions to specific problems.” If elected, he is destined to work with a Republican legislature. He doesn’t want to alienate “stakeholders” by demonizing certain practices. Still, we’re choking the Raccoon River with surplus nitrogen and Bloody Run is a bloody mess.
Sand said he pushes water quality all along his 14-stop introductory gubernatorial tour. Not in Storm Lake, of all places. He held forth to a packed house at Smokin’ Hereford, remarkable by BV County standards. The auditor — the only Democrat elected to statewide office — decried the two political parties as “poisonous” and waxed on about ranked-choice voting. Not a word over pulled pork about how the pork got there.
Sand said he wishes he could be an independent but the system forces him to make a choice, Democrat or Republican. “I can’t stand our system of politics,” he told the locals, including a few Republicans and independents. “I’m disgusted that we have only two choices.”
Iowa has a workforce crisis, he said, and we cannot afford to run off minority groups with exclusionary politics. Sand said that while he favors a ban on trans women playing women’s sports, we can all get along. We need immigrants, he said. “Jesus welcomed everyone,” he declared, and if you are hard of heart you should know at least that we need the hired help.
The crowd ate it up along with potato salad on a hot day. To a person they thought Sand is honest and square. He hunts and fishes. Except you are in Storm Lake and not a drop about water when the wells are running dry in Storm Lake, and Des Moines is under mandatory conservation because of the nitrate in that filthy old Raccoon.
This was all by way of introduction. You should expect that the leading Democrat in Iowa could clearly articulate a vision on how to make agriculture prosperous while letting our rivers run free.
People are desperate for moderation. They want Sand to win. The status quo demands that we poison the river. The loyal opposition would poison it more softly. We can hope that the quest for moderation does not mean just more of the same, as our aquifers drop and our rivers reek. Sand is smart. He can learn. Sixteen months flies by in no time.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
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I want Rob Sand to be successful. He needs to stop with the "both parties are the same, I wish I could be an independent" garbage. The parties are not the same. If he thinks they are he needs to do the hard thing and run as an independent. The democratic party will need a standard bearer, not some candidate whose slogan is "vote democrat, they're the lesser of two weasels". He is frankly coming across as a typical politician when he behaves this way.
Thank you for asking all of the right questions, Art. I hope Sand can come up with some good answers in time instead of continuing to fall back on way too many non answers.