Interesting Editorial in AJC on Water Supply in Atlanta

By Jay Bookman
Atlanta Journal Constitution

No news is bad news.
Officially, negotiators for Alabama, Florida and Georgia are still talking, still trying to agree on how to manage shared water resources and end the legal fight that threatens to strip much of metro Atlanta of its right to Lake Lanier’s water.Because the talks have been shrouded in secrecy, it’s hard for outsiders to know how much if any progress is being made. Maybe, just maybe, a deal can still be reached.But we do know this much:

As recently as December, governors of the three states were suggesting that a deal might be concluded fairly quickly, in time to be approved while their respective legislatures were still in session.
Well, the Alabama Legislature adjourned April 22, the Florida session ended April 30, and Georgia legislators went home April 29, with no deal even whispered about. Even if a deal were to be announced now, its prospects might be doomed by another event of April 29. That day, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced he was leaving the Republican Party to run for the Senate as an independent.

Like his counterparts, Sonny Perdue of Georgia and Bob Riley of Alabama, Crist’s term as governor is ending. Lame-duck governors often don’t wield a lot of influence, which means it might be hard even under good circumstances for the three to sell a deal to their legislators.With Crist’s announcement, however, he becomes a man without a political base, and as a result any deal he might bring to Florida legislators would almost certainly be rejected.

So where does that leave us?

In the past, Perdue has floated a second means of resolving the dispute politically. Congress, he has said, could be enlisted to impose a settlement on how to manage Lake Lanier and its downstream flow.
Initially, Georgia’s congressional delegation didn’t think much of that approach, perceiving it as a last-ditch effort by Perdue to dump the problem into their laps. Upon further inspection, that assessment hasn’t changed much.

According to John O’Keefe, a staff member for U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey, the governor’s idea “doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.” Georgia can’t match the political heft of the combined Florida and Alabama delegations, O’Keefe told a water conference last month at the University of West Georgia, and other states have no interest in getting involved in the dispute. But O’Keefe also sympathized with Perdue’s predicament. If no solution is found soon, he said, “Gov. Perdue would bear the brunt of the blame” of “an economic death knell to Georgia.”

With a political solution unlikely, that leaves the courts, where Georgia’s success rate has been dismal. Under a federal ruling last summer, the state has until July 17, 2012, to settle with its neighboring states or face a dramatic reduction in the amount of water it can withdraw from Lake Lanier. Georgia attorneys have filed an appeal to that decision. Ideally, they hope to overturn the decision by Judge Paul Magnuson that water supply is not a congressionally authorized purpose of Lake Lanier, which would be a great victory.

That seems unlikely. More realistically, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals could rule that Magnuson’s decision was too punitive to metro Atlanta, perhaps giving the region a reprieve from that looming deadline while a more rational solution is pursued.Water, in other words, is going to remain a chronic, recurring problem for metro Atlanta. “Once you have an interstate water conflict, you always have an interstate water conflict,” says water-law expert Jerry Sherk, an attorney and a water law expert in Colorado. Colorado and Kansas, he said, have fought over the Arkansas River for more than a century.
And they’re still at it.

For more columns from Jay Bookman please visit http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/about/

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