Georgia is winning the tri-state “water wars,” and Alabama Republican U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions is none too pleased about it.
The former federal prosecutor spent an hour and a half Monday building a case, bit by bit, that the Army Corps of Engineers has been hopelessly biased in favor of thirsty metro Atlanta and it’s high time for Congress to intervene.
Even as Sessions said he was encouraged by some of the corps’ comments and a public airing of the issue, he admitted the hearing was not likely to produce a new bill.
“They’ve gotten what they wanted,” Sessions said of Georgia. That’s been true from the court system to the halls of Congress, of late, in the latest twists in the multi-decade H2O struggle.
Sessions chaired the Environment and Public Works Committee hearing, as the committee’s real leaders were nowhere to be found on a sleepy Monday with no votes scheduled and most senators lingering in their home states.
Georgia Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, who have been deeply involved in the water wars jousting, sat sentry in the front row, but they don’t serve on the committee. It was Sessions’ show.
He used it to take swipes at Cobb County (for allegedly overdrawing water from Lake Allatoona), Gov. Nathan Deal (for allegedly not wanting to strike a water deal with his counterparts in Alabama and Florida) and Atlanta (for building “a billion-dollar football stadium for the Falcons” but not investing big money in water infrastructure).
Sessions was most interested in getting corps Brig. Gen. Donald E. Jackson Jr. to enforce the law, as Sessions sees it. The corps is rewriting the water manuals for the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint and Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa basins, though they will not be available for public comment for another two years.
Sessions questioned the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that has tipped the decades-long dispute over downstream flows from Lake Lanier in Georgia’s favor. He argued that the decision did not explicitly allow metro Atlanta to draw water from the reservoir, only from downstream areas.
Jackson said his understanding of the decision was it allowed Lake Lanier as an “authorized water supply” for metro Atlanta, which has been the widespread interpretation. Sessions countered that it was an “overstatement.”
“You should talk to your lawyer and make sure your lawyer is thinking correctly, too,” Sessions instructed Jackson.
Sessions had pushed for language in a Senate water resources bill that would have brought Congress into decisions over Lake Lanier and Lake Allatoona, as well as others around the country, but Isakson and Chambliss blocked the effort. And Georgia’s senators said Monday they were confident that the House water bill, which has not yet been released, won’t meddle in the dispute.
After the hearing, Sessions acknowledged that “it will be very difficult to move legislation if the governors don’t agree” on a water plan. During the hearing, he suggested that Deal has no incentive to do so, given Georgia’s wins in the court system and the corps’ lack of action against Cobb County, for instance.
In 2007, the corps warned the Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority in a letter that it was drawing too much from Lake Allatoona. Sessions claimed that in the ensuing years "the contract with Cobb County has been violated consistently," but the corps has taken no real action.
Isakson disagreed.
“I (told Sessions), ‘I’m going to buy you breakfast one day this week, because I live in Cobb County, and I have lived there for 40 years,’” Isakson said. “I know a little bit about some of those questions, so we’ll help educate him.”
Amid the details of acre-feet of water and circuit court decision footnotes, the basic two-decade caricature remains: fast-developing metro Atlanta drinking up water and downstream towns, farms and fisheries going dry.
Florida Department of Environmental Protection official Gregory Munson testified Monday that metro Atlanta’s thirst is “devastating” to Florida’s oyster populations in the Apalachicola Bay.
J. Brian Atkins, of the Alabama Office of Water Resources, said: “If Alabama wants to simply maintain its historical usages and flows, then it will have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure so Atlanta does not have to pay for its own development.”
But Judson Turner, of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, said the state and metro Atlanta have spent “significant” money on water infrastructure such as the Hickory Log Creek Reservoir in Canton. Deal has pledged $300 million for additional water storage, Turner added.
And he is hopeful that the three governors can, at long last, strike a water deal.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Turner said. “We are open to those conversations and we’ll get to work on ‘em.”
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