Mississippi River conservation groups are among a broad coalition urging the federal government to take action against nitrate contamination in drinking water, which they say has reached “crisis levels” and is a public health emergency.
Nitrate, which forms when nitrogen-rich sources combine with oxygen, has long been found in the country’s surface waters and groundwater, where it can end up in people’s drinking water. Consuming water with elevated levels of nitrate is linked to birth defects, thyroid problems and some cancers.
Agricultural fertilizer and manure are the most common sources of nitrogen to groundwater, with septic systems and lawn fertilizers also contributing. An April analysis from the Environmental Working Group found that about 18% of the U.S. population from 2021 to 2023 used drinking water from community systems with 3 milligrams per liter (mg/L) or more of nitrate, the threshold at which the Environmental Protection Agency says indicates contamination.
Advocates say nitrate contamination has struggled to capture public attention but is costly and hazardous to those it affects.
A May 5 letter to the Department of Health and Human Services and the EPA was signed by 80-plus groups, about a third of which are located in or focused on the Mississippi River basin. It calls on the agencies to “immediately identify and eliminate sources of nitrate pollution in drinking water and provide funds to communities to reduce nitrate to safe levels.”
The letter cites a recent report from the Iowa Environmental Council and the Harkin Institute at Drake University in Des Moines that found high nitrate levels in drinking water, as well as the presence of pesticides and forever chemicals, are linked to rising cancer rates in Iowa. Intensive farming across the state, including corn, soy and hogs, is the dominant source of nitrate pollution, the report notes.
“We understand these are long-term problems,” said Tyler Lobdell, senior attorney at Food & Water Watch, which spearheaded the letter. “The longer we wait to address root causes, the more difficult, and more expensive (it is), and the more harm is caused in the long run.”
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment on the letter. A spokesperson for the EPA said it is beginning the next round of review of national drinking water regulations, last published in 2024.
Too much nitrogen taints drinking water, hurts river ecosystem
Nitrate contamination is a widespread problem across the country, especially in the Corn Belt, but actions to address it have been slow-going.
Groups in multiple states, including Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa, have previously petitioned the EPA to take emergency action on nitrate problems in specific regions. Lobdell said the agency has either ignored or given an insufficient response to those petitions, dating back several years and multiple presidential administrations.
Under former President Joe Biden, the EPA restarted an assessment — which had been suspended during the first Trump administration — of the impacts of nitrate on human health. Environmental advocates had hoped that it could lead to an adjustment of the national standard for nitrate in drinking water, which currently sits at 10 mg/L, because some research shows impacts to human health below that level. Little progress has been made on the assessment.
Beyond human health impacts, too much nitrogen in surface water can drive excessive algae growth, causing harm to fish and other aquatic life. It’s one culprit, in addition to phosphorus, in the creation of the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone,” an area of low oxygen that spans thousands of square miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Kelly McGinnis, executive director of the environmental advocacy organization One Mississippi, a signatory on the letter, said that humans aren’t separate from the environment and that addressing nitrate contamination would have positive impacts on both.
She said she hopes the letter catches the attention of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pledged to “Make America Healthy Again” and has shown interest in reducing toxins in people’s diets.
“We felt the urgency right now to take advantage of the new research (from Iowa) to say, ‘Hey, this is something you guys need to be addressing,'” McGinnis said.
The spokesperson for the EPA said the agency is “committed to Making America Healthy Again by taking real, tangible steps to evaluate risks of nitrates in drinking water while following the law and gold standard science.”
Credibility is central to the criminal justice system.
Who is telling the truth? Who do jurors and judges believe?
A year ago, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, TMJ4 News and Wisconsin Watch published the Milwaukee County district attorney’s list of law enforcement officers with integrity violations, allegations of dishonesty or bias, and past criminal charges.
It was the first time the full list had been made public.
Prosecutors must share information about witness credibility, including that of police officers, with defense attorneys. Then the attorneys decide if they want to try to raise those credibility concerns in court.
Often called the “Brady/Giglio list” because of landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases, the list is meant to help ensure people get a fair trial and prevent wrongful convictions.
Since the list was published last year, local defense attorneys say they’ve noticed prosecutors giving more frequent Brady notifications. But they argue that Milwaukee County’s criteria of what gets an officer on the list remains too narrow – excluding officers who should qualify – and that there is still too much inconsistency among county prosecutors about when and how they share Brady material.
District Attorney Kent Lovern said his office has always fulfilled its legal and ethical obligations, but he acknowledged making changes to improve the list’s accuracy. The most significant was appointing two executive staff members to help maintain the list.
Some examples: an officer wrongly described as involved in a custody death, another listed for a criminal case that had been expunged, and others listed with the wrong agency. A handful of officers were deceased.
A new list, released in October 2025, did not have those kinds of problems.
“We put more eyes on the list that were beyond my two eyes,” Lovern said, adding: “We think that’s enhanced, at least, the information, making it as current as possible.”
In the last year, the District Attorney’s Office added 13 officers and removed two. Most of those officers were added because of internal, not criminal, investigations, and about half remain employed with their agency, according to public records.
For Caitlin Firer, a defense attorney, the public list has served as a backstop.
“If I’m watching a body camera and it’s striking me as something’s not right, I will run that officer’s name on the Brady list,” she told TMJ4 News, later adding: “It’s a resource now where we see those names, and we know they’re on the Brady list.”
Last year, the city’s largest police union, the Milwaukee Police Association, criticized the district attorney’s decision to release the list and news organizations’ decision to publish it. Others in policing praised the transparency.
“We’re given so much more credibility and respect when we take the stand as opposed to the average citizen,” said David Thomas, a Maryland-based policing consultant and expert.
The Brady list, he said, “goes to the very question of integrity.”
District attorney’s office using same strict criteria to add officers to the list
What has not changed is the strict criteria used to get an officer on the list.
Officers are added only if they have a pending criminal charge, a past conviction or an internal investigation “that brings into question the officer’s integrity.”
Experts told the Journal Sentinel last year the policy appeared improperly narrow and omitted other potential Brady material, including when a judge finds an officer not credible.
Lovern stood by that practice. His office still does not track those judicial decisions, commonly known as adverse credibility rulings.
“Credibility determinations, which are frequently made by courts, don’t constitute judgments of untruthfulness,” he said in a recent interview.
When prosecutors are weighing whether to call an officer to testify, it makes sense to distinguish between overt dishonesty and credibility rulings, said Rachel Moran, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, in an interview last month.
But an officer who was found not credible in court still belongs on the Brady list, she said.
“An officer who has misstated information in his police report, that’s exculpatory regardless of whether the officer intended to do it,” Moran said.
With long internal investigations, it can be years before an officer lands on the list
If an officer is referred to prosecutors for a potential criminal charge, he or she is placed on the Brady list immediately.
But when it comes to internal investigations, police departments often notify prosecutors at the end of the process, if an officer is found to have broken any department rules.
That can leave a gap.
Milwaukee police officer Eian West was added to the list in 2025, two years after he and three other officers came under investigation for their response to two domestic violence calls days apart that involved the same couple.
The officers were accused of failing to make mandatory arrests or file prompt reports, despite the woman saying the man had threatened her with a gun and tried to set her on fire, according to department records.
West and another officer went to the second call, on April 11, 2023, after two witnesses reported a man beating a woman in a front yard. The officers called her an ambulance.
Later that day, the woman woke up in the hospital and called Police District 4, prompting a sergeant to send two different officers to reinterview the woman and file a report.
Two days after that, the woman had a miscarriage.
Internal affairs asked West why he waited until his next shift, on April 12, after the other officers had been dispatched, to write his report. West’s report also listed the woman as the suspect and did not document the fact that she lived with the man, which is one of the elements of domestic violence, according to a summary from internal affairs.
West maintained he “was not trying to cover up that he was sent to a battery (domestic violence) and did not file it,” police records show.
Still, the officer agreed that he had violated the core value of integrity because he was not completely honest and accurate about all relevant facts in the case, the records say.
The domestic violence calls took place in April 2023. Internal affairs interviewed West that July. But the internal investigation did not end until 2025, and only after that was West added to the Brady list.
During those two years, prosecutors did not know his integrity was under question in an investigation that ultimately resulted in a 20-day suspension.
Since prosecutors did not know, they could not disclose it to defense attorneys.
Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman acknowledged it sometimes takes years to complete internal investigations, depending on the complexity.
“We are not trying to delay for delay’s sake,” Norman said in an interview. “It is unfortunate that we have a number of investigations on our plate.”
More urgent internal investigations, such as police shootings, can take priority, and the department must respect the officers’ due process and collective bargaining rights, the chief said.
Angel Johnson, a regional attorney manager with the State Public Defenders Office in Milwaukee, said that the office’s clients also have rights.
“If there’s an officer that has credibility issues and they’re going to testify in a proceeding against my client, (my clients) have the same right to due process,” she said.
Why some officers were removed from the Brady list
The Brady list is fluid.
As officers come on, others come off.
Kenton Burtch and Elric Erving, both of the Milwaukee Police Department, were removed in the last year.
Erving was investigated for disorderly conduct in 2019. No criminal charges were filed, and his name came off the list, Lovern said.
Burtch was accused of improperly filing his time card and claiming an estimated $1,700 he was not owed. He was demoted from sergeant and suspended for six days.
He appealed to the city’s Fire and Police Commission, which found the situation was a mistake related to the officer’s remote work arrangement and confusion over how to handle it. The commission overturned his discipline, finding “no indication or evidence of intentional misconduct,” and restored his rank.
Because of that, Lovern said, his name came off the list.
In the past, Lovern has removed officers who complete deferred prosecution agreements or who win appeals to get their jobs back.
Some defense attorneys have argued that officers should only rarely, if ever, come off the Brady list.
“Once you’re placed on the Brady list, if you continue to testify in court, you should not be removed,” Johnson said.
As of September 2025, the list had 217 entries involving 190 individual officers. The district attorney’s office released the list in October in response to a public records request. Reporters filed records requests to gather more information about new individuals on the list. Some of those requests remain pending.
In the months since, the list continues to change. For example, the district attorney’s office added a Milwaukee officer recently charged with accessing sensitive license plate data for personal reasons, despite tagging the purpose of his searches as “investigation.”
It was not the first time the officer, Josue Ayala, had been accused of dishonesty on the job, with one defense attorney even telling a federal prosecutor that Ayala exaggerated so much that it seemed to be a “compulsion,” the Journal Sentinel previously reported. Ayala has since resigned.
Defense attorneys continue to rely on media reports, decisions from the city’s Fire and Police Commission and civil lawsuit judgments to identify officers with questionable credibility – and that’s a problem, Johnson said.
“It should be happening from the DA’s office, but we are still finding ourselves doing that legwork and it’s not our obligation or ethical duty to do so,” she said.
This story is part of Duty to Disclose, an investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, TMJ4 News and Wisconsin Watch. The Fund for Investigative Journalism provided financial support for this project.
Wisconsin Watch has a new partner in the fight for facts.
Ahead of another pivotal election year, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Wisconsin Watch are teaming up to produce more Fact Briefs, 150-word answers to yes/no questions based on claims made in the infosphere.
Wisconsin Watch has partnered with Gigafact since 2022 to produce more than 600 bite-sized fact checks. We’re part of a network of 18 nonprofit newsrooms across the country working to equip the public with accurate information to inform civic discussion.
The Journal Sentinel, part of the USA Today Network and the largest newsroom in Wisconsin, was an early adopter of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking nonprofit founded in 2007.
As Journal Sentinel Editor Greg Borowski writes in a column today at jsonline.com, the switch to Fact Briefs will appeal to readers seeking accurate information quickly and with a clearer true-or-false format, rather than PolitiFact’s six-tiered “score card” for assessing whether a claimant is telling the truth. Fact Briefs focus less on the claimant, and more on the claim itself.
“This partnership will increase the number of Wisconsin-focused items and allow us to present them more quickly and in ways we think readers most want to get them,” Borowski writes.
The facts matter, even more so in a world where politicians and media influencers seem to habitually get away with bending, breaking or simply disregarding the truth. Fighting for the facts isn’t about picking a political side or committing to a particular worldview, it’s about nurturing a shared reality that forms the basis of a free and civilized society.
That’s why the courts, teachers, scientists, the folks managing your investment accounts and even the refs checking the instant replay cameras take the facts so seriously. Why should our political discourse be any different?
We’re excited to grow our capacity to keep the public informed, but we continue to need the public’s support. Whether this new partnership will continue after the November election will depend on support from Wisconsin Watch donors. Click here to find out more about how you can support the fight for facts.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
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