Perdue willing to call special session on water

By Jeremy Redmon and Jim Galloway

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Gov. Sonny Perdue says he is willing to call a special legislative session if necessary to work out a solution to the roughly 20-year-old water rights dispute between Georgia, Florida and Alabama

Perdue said he hopes the state Legislature can take action on a compact between the states during its current session, but he called that an “aggressive, challenging timeline.”

“I sense a renewed spirit of cooperation between Florida and Alabama, in order to get this done,” Perdue told reporters Tuesday. “I appealed to my colleagues that, if we’re going to leave a legacy in our states of solving this, rather than punting it to another administration, we’ve got to move very quickly. I think they received that well.

“We are committed to doing it in the regular session,” he continued. “But frankly, if we get a deal that doesn’t fall into the parameters of that, I believe water is an issue for which I would be willing to call a special session, to ratify a compact among our states.”

A spokesman for Perdue said no such compact has been drafted yet.

“Still working on specifics,” Perdue spokesman Bert Brantley said in an email. “No discussion yet of which legislator would introduce it. We'll save all that for after we get the deal done first.”

A federal judge stunned Georgia officials in July when he ruled the state has little rights to Lake Lanier, a federal reservoir that is the main source of the Atlanta region’s drinking water. The judge has given the states and Congress three years to reach a compromise before restricting access to the lake to levels from the mid-1970s, when Atlanta was a fraction of its current size.