Environmental concerns can be reported online through the DNR’s Environmental Concern Form. If you plan to report your concern through DNR’s form, you should follow these steps:

1. When you reach DNR’s Environmental Concern Form webpage, you should select ‘Report an Environmental Concern’ from the dropdown menu under ‘Type of Inquiry’ (note there are also options to submit general inquiries and comments through this form).
2. Once you select ‘Report an Environmental Concern’, you will see spaces to fill out your county, the nearest city, date of the incident, a description of your concern, and driving directions to the location of your concern. All of this information is required. Especially in rural areas, it may be hard to rely on street addresses or landmarks to identify your concern location and DNR is more likely to conduct a thorough investigation of your concern if they can visit the site in question.
3. There’s also optional information that you may include in your environmental concern. As a general rule, DNR will do a more thorough investigation if you provide more information. You have the option to include the name and contact information for the ‘Responsible Party or Property Owner,’ which is the person or facility you think is responsible for your environmental concern. You don’t have to be certain that this party is responsible to provide their contact information; DNR will investigate the party before taking any enforcement action. Even if this party is not responsible, the conversation may give DNR more information to help their investigation. 
4. Your contact information is also optional. DNR can only inform you of the outcome of the concern investigation and/or ask for additional information regarding your concern if you share your contact information. However, environmental concern forms may be disclosed to the public under the Missouri Sunshine Law. Therefore, you should not provide any personal information that you wish to keep private. Note that if you choose to provide personal contact information on the Environmental Concern Form, your address is optional.

If you would like to report your concern by phone, you have two options.

1. Call your DNR regional office. You may locate your regional office and find their phone numbers here.
2. Call DNR’s general office number, 800-361-4827, on weekdays between 8:00 AM CST and 5:00 PM CST.

If you call in your environmental concern, you should include all of the same information that you would in the online form. Again, some information is optional but may help DNR conduct a thorough investigation and help you hold them accountable for following up on your concern. See the sample phone script below for an idea of how to report an environmental concern over the phone. You may also use this script to guide you when reporting an environmental emergency. 

Note that your call may need to be redirected to the appropriate office and staff member. Make sure to write down the full name of the staff member to whom you report your environmental concern in case you need to follow up. The staff member taking your call may respond throughout and/or prompt you to provide information with their own questions – especially if you forget to include required information. It is OK if you do not follow this script exactly, but it should guide you through the conversation and help you remember what information is important. 

The regional office of DNR that receives your environmental concern report will follow up with a concern investigation. You may find an example of what this could look like here. To conduct an investigation, DNR staff visit the concern location to assess: 1) the validity of the concern, and 2) the cause and impact of the concern (if the concern is determined to be valid). While there is a standard procedure for investigating environmental concerns, the extent of the investigation relies in part on the information that you provide in your report and in part on whether DNR staff sees evidence of a concern. If they do not see evidence of your concern, DNR staff will not conduct extensive water quality tests, take site photos, or determine a responsible party/property owner. 

If the DNR site investigation supports a pollution concern, DNR staff will attempt to locate its source. If you identify a responsible party/property owner and their contact information in your environmental concern report, this gives DNR a place to start. Once DNR locates the source of the concern, they will determine the appropriate enforcement action for the responsible party/property owner. Typically, DNR takes a “compliance assistance” approach to help violators understand environmental regulations and avoid future violations. Unfortunately, this means that DNR rarely issues fines or revokes permits – even for repeat violators. You may want to see the section on legal action for repeat violations.

The results of the investigation (including any enforcement action) will be recorded and kept at the appropriate regional office. If you provide your contact information, DNR should follow up with you directly to share the findings of their concern investigation and any enforcement actions they may have taken. You may try calling the regional office and ask to follow up on an environmental concern report if you do not hear back within a week or two.

Even if you have not submitted an environmental concern report, you can request access to these documents under the Missouri Sunshine Law (learn how to make these requests in Part 2) or request to review them at a regional office. Letters of Warning (LOW) and Notices of Violation (NOV) – two enforcement actions taken by the DNR – are searchable in this database; however, the documents themselves must also be requested through a Sunshine request.