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Sunday, February 24, 2008
The serious side of a Tennessee-Georgia border war
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“You’ve got to see this. Who’s got Google Earth on their computer?”
The demand came from a shirt-sleeved Sonny Perdue on Friday, and was directed at a staff bunkered in one of his basement offices in the State Capitol.
An aide quickly fired up the requested program. “I’ll take over from here,” the governor said. Perdue bumped the aide from his seat and grabbed the mouse.
A satellite image of Georgia’s northwest corner flashed on the screen. Perdue put the cursor — in the shape of a small fist — on the state border. The latitude read 34.59 degrees.
But the Georgia Code puts the Georgia-Tennessee border at 35 degrees north of the equator. Perdue moved his cursor northward into Tennessee, until the computer read-out hit the 35th parallel.
The small fist had grabbed the middle of Nickajack Lake, a reservoir fed by a brief swath of the Tennessee River that could water north Georgia for decades to come.
“Look at that,” the governor marveled.
Last week, the House and Senate passed separate measures requiring the state of Georgia to revisit its longstanding border dispute with Tennessee. The legislation was immediately pronounced an international punchline. The state Senate encouraged the giggles by singing a round of “This Land Is My Land” prior to unanimous passage.
But don’t be fooled. The people involved in this are looking at a water shortage, exacerbated by drought, that could jeopardize thousands of billions of dollars in development over the next 50 years. A wet state grows, a dry one stagnates — and the competition with neighbors is fearsome.
Sponsors of the legislation are as serious as a heart attack.
“I don’t think it’s a gimmick,” Perdue told reporters a few hours after his computer demonstration. But the enthusiasm the governor showed in the basement had shifted to a diplomatic practicality.
“I think we have to be very careful in the way we proceed in this effort. As it gets more and more serious, the people of Tennessee get more and more concerned. There was probably a better way to do this — legislation’s a sort of in-your-face sort of thing,” the governor said.
The idea for the border challenge sprang from a conversation about 10 months ago between Brad Carver, a 36-year-old utilities lawyer in Atlanta, and a water expert with the University of Mississippi.
The pair drew up a confidential, 19-page memo that outlined the history of Georgia’s 190-year dispute with Tennessee, and offered advice on how Georgia might finally win the argument and gain access to a river with 15 times the flow of the Chattahoochee River at Buford Dam.
“As the drought got worse, this made more and more sense. We can’t conserve our way to a solution,” Carver said. The state is growing too fast, he said — and the only alternatives are desalination plants on the Atlantic coast, and the Tennessee River.
Carver handed the outline to state Rep. Harry Geisinger (R-Roswell), a former power company man who was in the Legislature when the border issue was last tackled in 1971, and state Sen. David Shafer (R-Duluth), chairman of the Senate utilities committee.
You can see the memo here. It contains some spectacular maps.
For Georgia, the Tennessee River has every advantage over coastal desalination plants. Save for a single mountain range, the flow would be mostly downhill. “The right-of-way is already acquired. It’s Interstate 75,” Geisinger said. A pipeline would connect Atlanta and Chattanooga in revolutionary fashion.
Many people, including Perdue, have noted that moving a state boundary would be unprecedented in modern times — and thus might seem Herculean. (Ironically, Tennesee forced Mississippi in 1890 to move its border south. Because it violated the 35th parallel.)
But remember that neither land nor lines are the object here. Water is.
“Behind all this, it’s clear that the Tennessee River is the most important part of this idea,” Carver said.
No one will admit to it, but the underlying strategy appears to be this:
For the last eight years, the state of Tennessee has rebuffed the idea of sharing any water with metro Atlanta. Build a strong enough court case with the border issue and perhaps Georgia would agree to let Tennessee keep the current line — so long as Georgia gets the water it needs.
The Gator tag bill picks up its first opponent in the Senate
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It looks like opponents of H.B. 1165, the bill that could curtail prestige tags for alumni from out-of-state universities, have picked up their first champion.
The measure would prevent the renewal of those out-of-state university tags unless our neighbors — Florida and Alabama in particular — loosen their rules for alumni from Georgia schools. The House passed it on Thursday, and sent it to the Senate.
But on Saturday, state Sen. Mitch Seabaugh (R-Sharpsburg) sent a note to Tim Cowan, president of the Atlanta Clemson Club, in which he said he doesn’t care how they do it in South Carolina, or Florida.
Wrote Seabaugh:
“I can not control what other states do - they have to answer to their voters. My constituents want the pride of displaying their alma mater. That is what I responded to when I voted for the alumni plates. Flordia citizens should expect the same from their elected officials.
“I will represent my constituents and their wish to have their alumni plates.”
The above e-mail was passed to us by Kurt Raulin, the attorney and Florida grad we mentioned in a previous post.
Raulin said the leadership of the Atlanta Clemson Club and the Atlanta Gator Club are now contacting other ACC and SEC alumni groups in the state to rally opposition to H.B. 1165.
Wrote Raulin:
“It would seem that over half of the other ACC and SEC alumni are in the process of applying for their own specialty tags. Even if half of these other alumni groups are ultimately approved (say, 11 of a total of 22 non-Georgia ACC and SEC schools) that would yield at least 11,000 more specialty tags and at least $275,000 in annual voluntary contributions to the state of Georgia’s treasury.”
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