The Des Moines Register swung for the fences in today’s front page, above-the-fold story about Sen. Tom Harkin’s efforts to secure federal funding for a sewage treatment facility for the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville four years ago, but it is not clear that Harkin actually did anything wrong.

According to the story, Harkin pushed through an exemption for the sewage treatment plant so that it could receive federal funds even though it would only serve Agriprocessors and not the surrounding community.  Most of the sources quoted seemed to agree that the meatpacking plant, which was by far the biggest employer in Postville, would not have survived without the exemption.

The money, nearly $8 million, came from an environmental program from which Agriprocessors normally would have been disqualified. The grant and loan were used to build a sewage-treatment plant that serves only the meatpacker.

The environmental program, run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is designed to help small towns improve their sewage systems. The new sewage-treatment plant is technically owned by Postville, but it doesn’t serve the town’s residents. Department administrators say that fact usually would have prevented it from receiving money from the program. But Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, used his influence to exempt the project from those rules in 2004.

Harkin was reelected by a wide margin last month, and, should he decide to run again, he does not face another election until 2014.

The real story is not that Harkin helped the plant secure funding for the sewage treatment plant, but rather that the funds included a loan that Postville finds itself unable to pay back.  The Iowa Independent’s Lynda Waddington wrote about that three weeks ago, when Sen. Chuck Grassley said he would push to extend the USDA loan’s payment terms to make the debt more manageable for Postville.  “You can’t get blood out of a turnip,” Grassley said at the time.

There are also the very real environmental concerns that made the sewage treatment facility necessary in the first place, and those are still not completely resolved.  In October, a cow’s skull, a hide, and two dismembered legs were found in the plant’s wastewater lagoon, though the Iowa Department of Natural Resources did not assess a fine at the time.