For Grand Lake, the problem is not limited to what happens in Oklahoma. It starts with the water running away from livestock operations in neighboring states.

Missouri officials have raised concerns about E. coli levels for nearly every stream flowing from their state into northeast Oklahoma. A group that regularly checks the quality of Grand Lake has not found the levels of bacteria to be high enough to be a problem so far.

That’s good news for a dozen or so entities that draw drinking water from the lake. But Bob Luckenbill, who lives near the lake’s Elk River Arm, said Oklahomans are paying for the pollutants.

“They have to do more now to make it clean to use,” he said. “How much more is it costing us to clean the water?”

It doesn’t help that Grand Lake also gets hit with lead, cadmium and zinc seeping from abandoned mines near the Kansas border. Tar Creek runs next to a Superfund clean-up site once dedicated to heavy metal mining. It eventually flows into the Neosho River, then into Grand Lake.

Solutions to quality problems are usually not easy. One suggestion forces farmers to truck off livestock waste, so that extra nutrients and bacteria cannot be washed away from their farms in the rain.

Mark Harrison, a spokesman for the state Conservation Commission, said another approach that sets aside land is key to abating the nutrient-laden sediments that wash into streams and reservoirs.

The commission recently signed an agreement with the federal government to make available $20.6 million for landowners who join a conservation program. Farmers who set aside land for buffers for water runoff receive money in return.

Harrison said these buffers can play a dramatic role in filtering nitrogen and phosphorous from water runoff before it reaches streams and lakes. It was proven to work in New York, he said, where agricultural operations set aside land upriver from the sources of New York City’s drinking water supply.

The city must filter water for drinking, he said, but it does not specially treat it.

The question for Oklahoma is whether such a plan, or something else like it, can clear the waters of Grand Lake.

— Wallace Kennedy of The Joplin (Mo.) Globe contributed to this report.