Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio has dipped a big toe into the exhausting regional battle over water rights that has divided Georgia, Florida and Alabama for more than two decades.
And one high-profile Georgia official is publicly wondering why the U.S. senator from Florida took the plunge.
Rubio joined Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida's other senator and a Democrat, and Alabama's two Republican senators to criticize the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers "mismanagement" of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin and urged that both states be shielded from any shenanigans in the pending appropriations bill.
The senators want Congress to weigh in on the fight in a forthcoming omnibus spending bill by preventing any changes in water plans by the Corps until the states' governors hash out an agreement. The three states have warred over water access since the 1990s, and the latest round of litigation between Florida and Georgia is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
"We urge the Subcommittee to include language in any omnibus appropriations vehicle that ensures that management of both of these critical basins are not left to the whims of an unaccountable federal bureaucracy, but instead is properly determined and agreed upon by each state's governor," they wrote in a letter to a Senate Appropriations panel overseeing spending on water projects.
The dispatch raised eyebrows in Georgia. Chris Riley, who is Gov. Nathan Deal's top aide, took particular exception to it. Referring to Rubio's letter, he wondered aloud: "And he is asking Georgians to support him for president?"
You will recall that, in June, the governor of Georgia listed four Republicans he'd be willing to endorse in the 2016 contest. None of them were named Rubio.
The Rubio letter raises the stakes for what had already been a months-long Georgia-Alabama water fight over appropriations language regarding the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa basin, pitting senior appropriator Richard Shelby, R-Ala., against Johnny Isakson, R-Ga. Now the ACF and the Florida delegation have entered the mix, with Georgia trying to keep Congress out of it.
You'll recall that the Corps recently updated its water-sharing plans for the Chattahoochee River, delivering a proposal that would allow metro Atlanta and downstream Georgia cities to soak up much more water than they currently use.
It also concluded that the increased withdrawals would have a "negligible" impact on the economy and ecology of Florida's Apalachicola Bay. That didn't win any friends in Florida, and Rubio's letter says Atlanta's water withdrawals already have "significant negative impacts" on Alabama and Florida.
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On that note, Georgia's water bills for the new round of costly litigation keep adding up. Gov. Nathan Deal signed an executive order this week transferring another $5 million from his emergency fund to cover the costs of the legal battle.
That's on top of the $4 million he shifted from that account in February to cover the rising courtroom costs. Some statehouse wags predict that Georgia's share of the litigation for this appeal could amount to roughly $20 million.
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