In what can only be viewed as a mea culpa for allowing metro Atlanta's main water source to sink to a record low, the federal government on Tuesday proposed changing operations at Lake Lanier and four other reservoirs on the Chattahoochee River.

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The modified plan by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would decrease the amount of water released from Lanier under most conditions.

But Georgia water experts say the plan does not go nearly far enough to protect Lanier during droughts.

In a letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the corps' Mobile District planning and environmental division chief Curtis M. Flakes said the corps learned two lessons during the ongoing, record-breaking drought:

First, the corps needs a drought contingency plan for operating its Chattahoochee dams;

Secondly, more water should be held in the reservoirs when they are low.

"The prolonged exceptional drought conditions experienced in the [Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint] basin throughout the spring and summer of 2007 resulted in impacts to the basin and composite storage within the basin that were unanticipated by the previous [operations plan] analysis," Flakes said in the letter.

Fish and Wildlife has until June 1 to review the proposal to make sure it protects federally endangered and threatened fish and freshwater mussels in Florida. Any changes will take effect then.

One of the main operational changes proposed has to do with the minimum flow of water the corps sends into Florida, where the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers meet and flow into the Apalachicola River.

Until November, when the corps made a temporary adjustment to its operational plan, the agency for months had been sending no less than 3.2 billion gallons of water a day into Florida, even when Mother Nature was providing less than half that amount in rainfall and stream flows. The proposal calls for dropping the minimum flow into Florida during droughts to 2.9 billion gallons of water a day, a 10 percent decrease.

The flow comes from Lanier and four other reserviors on the Chattahoochee, as well as from the Flint River.

Pat Stevens, the Atlanta Regional Commission's environmental planning chief who helps plan for the metro region's water needs, called the corps' proposal "a step in the right direction. They're recognizing that the [current operation] needs to be modified, but it's not going far enough."

Stevens said Lanier, which is at a record low for this time of year, would only be about one foot higher than it is today if the plan had been in place when the drought began. The lake is currently nearly 13 feet below its normal level. That equates to just more than half the lake's stored water capacity as the hot summer months loom ahead with the related increases in water use and evaporation.

Florida officials have said too much water is being left in Lanier, mostly to quench metro Atlanta's thirst.

Sarah Williams, spokeswoman for Florida's Department of Environmental Protection, said the department hopes a new operations plan will be "protective of the Apalachicola Bay and River ecosystem."

When the drought began in 2006, the weather collided with corps policy, creating metro Atlanta's water crisis late last year. That led to the near-total ban on outdoor watering and a state mandate to reduce water use 10 percent.

In the spring of 2006, the corps began releasing billions of gallons of additional water from Lanier and the other federal reservoirs on the Chattahoochee to assist fewer than 10 federally protected Gulf sturgeon fish in laying their eggs.

At the same time, the corps was accidentally releasing more than 22 billion gallons of water from Lanier due to a faulty gauge that measures the lake's elevation. The result was a nearly two foot drop from which the lake never fully recovered.

The two actions coincided with the beginning of metro Atlanta's record-busting drought, now entering its third year.

As Atlanta's Commissioner of the Department of Watershed Management Rob Hunter told a Congressional committee last month, the drought has been terrible, but "it is the management plan implemented by the Corps that has been the real disaster."

Not much was done about the lost water from the faulty gauge, other than a public tongue-lashing of an Army general by Georgia's two U.S. senators.

But when the corps' sent copious amounts of water down to Florida for the prehistoric fish and several types of threatened and endangered freshwater mussels, with very little scientific data to support the need for the additional water, Gov. Sonny Perdue and state Environmental Protection Division Director Carol Couch protested, to no avail.

In a letter to the corps in May 2006, Couch foreshadowed Lanier's precipitous drop to levels not seen since the lake was filling in the 1950s and warned "draining Lake Lanier to such a low level could cause serious harm throughout the [Chattahoochee] Basin in 2006 and for years to come."

Between November and February, the White House tried to nudge the governors of Georgia, Alabama and Florida into a water-sharing agreement over Lanier and the Chattahoochee. The talks failed. But Perdue's spokesman Bert Brantley said Tuesday's proposal shows the corps at least listened to Georgia's request for a change in how Lanier is operated.

"In our opinion, all you have to do is look at Lake Lanier and see that the [current operations plan] is what got us into the situation where literally the headwater of the system was threatened," Brantley said. The proposal is "a positive outcome in that it's the process moving forward."

Tuesday's proposal only tweaks the current operations plan, which is considered interim. The Chattahoochee System has not updated its water control plan since an attempt in 1989, just before the tri-state water war broke out over how much water metro Atlanta was taking from Lanier.

A new plan is currently in the works, and is expected to take three years. Any operations plan approved now will be in effect until then.

Wilton Rooks, a director of the Lake Lanier Association board, said the fact that the corps is proposing a drought contingency plan is encouraging.

"When things get into that zone, it requires some more drastic actions to be taken," Rooks said. "At least they're beginning to recognize that the mussels might have to get by with less water if we don't have the water to give."