Partisan Influence on Perceptions of Drinking Water Quality and Policy in Dunn and Barron Counties

Abstract

In the Flathead Valley of Montana, where I grew up, one of the most polarizing issues within the community was the proposal of a water-bottling plant on Flathead Lake. While everyone cared about the lake’s water quality, they had different ideas of the best way to balance competing business and environmental interests. Coming to Menomonie, I was interested to see how polarization on water played out against an incredibly different backdrop. While our concerns in Montana were centered on keeping the lake clean, I wanted to see how pre-existing water issues could shape public perception of water and water policy.

To do this, I focused on drinking water. Drinking water sits at the intersection of environmental and public health policies, both of which have become increasingly polarized. Polarization in areas like climate change can easily trickle down into associated issues, such as drinking water. However, because drinking water is vital for survival, it may avoid the partisan pitfalls that impact other environmental issues. As a result, I asked a few key questions during my time here: Does political identity change how people perceive drinking water quality? Does political identity impact the kinds of policies that people support? Are partisan divides present within the branches of local government that are making water policy?

I knew these questions couldn’t be answered easily, so I used a mixed-methods approach to address as many perspectives as possible. I interviewed eleven Dunn County residents, including government officials who worked on drinking water, to understand the hurdles to clean drinking water and the impact of partisanship on policy decisions. One theme emerged from both government officials and community members: everyone agrees that drinking water is important, but we can’t agree on how to go about it. Despite this, residents said they trusted the local government to do the right thing regarding drinking water. From these interviews, I concluded that while partisanship in government may exist to some extent, drinking water hasn’t polarized so much that it prevents effective policy.

However, I still needed to figure out how partisanship worked in community members more broadly. To do so, I sent out 1,500 surveys to Dunn and Barron County. These surveys asked residents how concerned they were about their own drinking water, as well as how important they thought a range of water issues were. I was also curious about how people responded to policy, so I asked about how much people supported different regulations and policies that impacted drinking water.

Once I analyzed these survey results, I realized that they supported my findings from my interviews. Political identity really didn’t impact how concerned people were about drinking water. However, this wasn’t the case for the policy side of things. As respondents became more right-leaning, they also became less likely to support regulations and policies geared toward addressing water quality. Although a divide in policy may exist, it’s certainly not insurmountable; in general, more bipartisan support existed for policies that required low government intervention, such as expanding eligibility for grants to replace nitrate-contaminated wells.

Despite having a lot of common ground on drinking water across political identification, respondents perceived high levels of partisanship. When asked how much confidence they had in community members of the opposite party to “do the right thing” regarding drinking water quality, nearly half of respondents said that they had little or no confidence. However, people do trust local government, with less than a quarter saying that they had little or no trust in local government. These results indicate three things. First, there is little to no polarization on how important people think drinking water is. Second, there is some polarization on how people want to solve drinking water problems. Third, people perceive substantial community polarization on drinking water issues, but this doesn’t necessarily extend to local government.

While polarization is never good news, these results indicate that community-wide, bipartisan collaboration on drinking water issues is possible. For the most part, people have the same goal of making sure that community residents have access to clean, safe water. While we may have different ideas about the best way to get there, there is a desire for local government to work across partisan divides on this topic. Local government can mitigate the impact of partisanship on water quality by emphasizing common ground and interests across political identifications. Back home, the shared interest of clean water was eventually enough to win a lawsuit that shut down the water bottling plant. It’s my hope that with this common goal in mind, Menomonie can achieve the same clean water without legal battles or community rifts.

The detection of high levels of microcystin and anatoxin should encourage further monitoring of toxins in the lake. Caution should be exercised when interacting with these lakes. Although the EPA recreational microcystin limit is higher than levels detected during sampling, there is potential for microcystin levels to be above EPA recreational limits. The relationship between habitat and toxin levels in both west-central Wisconsin lakes was not as simple as was predicted at the beginning of the study. Further research on lake habitat and cyanobacteria community is needed to better understand and predict toxin presence.