Sustainability Water wars reach possible end, as next drought looms

Above The Water Line

hile you were enjoying holiday events in December, and perhaps staying abreast of the impeachment proceedings, a significant decision was announced in the 30-year “water wars” among Georgia, Florida and Alabama.

Wthat metro Atlanta is taking, and plans to take, more than a “reasonable” share of water to fuel its growth at the expense of their communities and industries. Florida’s lawyers want a cap on upstream water use in metro Atlanta and also on farmers in the Flint River basin to protect their local economies and ecology.

In my capacity as the (now-retired) director of Chattahoochee Riverkeeper – concerned about the sustainability of the entire river basin – I have followed and participated in the fits, starts, bumps, dead-ends and occasional successes of this prolonged water dispute.

Highlights include: the filing of initial lawsuits in 1990; attempts to negotiate a tristate compact (including a marathon meeting with then-Speaker Newt Gingrich about compliance

By Sally Bethea

Sally Bethea is the retired executive director of Chattahoochee Riverkeeper. She continues her advocacy for the environment and won the Georgia Press Association Award for opinion writing for her monthly column in INtown.

Georgia officials reacted jubilantly to the news that a federal judge appointed as a fact-finding referee by the U.S. Supreme Court sided with them in litigation brought by Florida over the allocation of water in the ApalachicolaChattahoocheeFlint (ACF) River Basin. In other words: how water in the basin, which straddles the three states, should be distributed among competing users during droughts. Recommendations in the ruling made by Judge Paul Kelly Jr. will be considered no later than 2021.

Not for the first time in the past three decades, I wondered if this was really the beginning of the end – at least for the legal cases that have kept untold numbers of lawyers employed for the past three decades, spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars. In a nutshell, the downstream states in the river basin (Florida and Alabama) have long believed with federal environmental laws and the need for more science); the severe drought of 1998-2003; the implosion of the compact negotiations; the exceptional drought of 2006-2009 (when Lake Lanier was down 21 feet); major court decisions in 2009 and 2011; the creation of the collaborative ACF Stakeholders in 2009; the much-lauded, but limited, state conservation law passed in 2010; the severe drought of 2010-2012; American Rivers’ naming of the ACF Basin as the “most endangered river” in the nation in 2016; and now the ruling by Judge Kelly.

I have learned, along the way, that few officials and their lawyers are willing to negotiate a solution that might give an “extra” drop to any stakeholders who are not their constituents or clients. For those in charge, it has largely been a zero-sum game focused on political boundaries.

A bright light in this longrunning dispute has been the ACF Stakeholders: a group of diverse water-using interests in the river basin who have worked tirelessly to develop a consensus on how to divvy up limited water resources during droughts. The group’s Sustainable Water Management Plan is an excellent, Continued on page 30