A federal appeals court handed Georgia another victory in the decades-long tri-state water wars, refusing a request by Alabama and Florida for a new hearing on the use of Lake Lanier as a drinking water source for metro Atlanta.
Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley on Monday vowed to press the issue with the Supreme Court.
“We are disappointed with the decision of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and will immediately seek review of the ruling in the United States Supreme Court,” Bentley said in a statement Monday. “Allowing Atlanta to tap water from Lake Lanier significantly limits the flow of water downstream to Alabama.”
Lawyers for Alabama and Florida had hoped to persuade the full 11th Circuit Court to review the decision in June by a three-judge panel overturning a 2009 order of U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson limiting use of Lanier. In that order, Magnuson said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had no right to allow nearly 3 million Atlanta residents to rely on the federal reservoir for drinking water and set a three-year deadline for the states to reach an agreement or the use of the lake would be severely restricted.
The appellate panel handed the problem back to the corps with a new deadline of one year to work out an allocation of water from the reservoir.
The 11th Circuit’s one-paragraph decision not to rehear the case was released Friday but not discovered by lawyers until Monday. None of the 10 judges -- including three from Florida and two from Alabama -- voted in favor of a new hearing.
“Today’s ruling gives the state of Georgia finality on this issue and allows us to move forward in our negotiations with the governors of Alabama and Florida,” said Brian Robinson, a spokesman for Gov. Nathan Deal. “We all know where we stand now from a legal perspective, and the governor feels confident the three states can come to an agreement that mutually benefits them all. The court’s decision is another positive step forward.”
Alabama and Florida had argued that Congress never gave permission for Atlanta to use Lake Lanier for drinking water when it authorized construction of Buford Dam in 1946.
Lewis Jones, one of the attorneys representing the Georgia defendants in the case, said the ruling was expected but still comes as a relief.
“It’s absolutely a good day,” he said. “Getting the order denying them removes all this uncertainty that we have been living with a long time.”
Jones said the fact that not a single appellate judge showed any interest in rehearing the case makes it very unlikely to reach the Supreme Court. It also makes it more likely the states can get about the task of actually deciding how to share a limited supply of water, he said.
“We’ve now spent 20 years litigating the wrong issues,” he said. “Instead of getting down to business and coming up with a solution that would work for everybody ... we’ve been fighting over what does some document mean that was written in 1946.”
William Droze, lead council for Gwinnett County in the water litigation, said he hopes the corps will recognize return flows to the lake as a component of the allocation, as the court suggested.
Last year, Gwinnett completed work on a $72 million pipeline that can send 40 million gallons of treated water a day back into Lake Lanier, the sole source of water for its 800,000 residents. The county draws between 70 million and 80 million gallons of water from Lanier daily.
Staff writers Bill Rankin and Aaron Gould Sheinin contributed to this article.
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