Georgia’s tab for the decades-old legal fight over water rights with Alabama and Florida is nearing $64 million since then-Gov. Nathan Deal took office in 2011, state officials said Friday.
That includes $5.7 million for litigation costs and legal fees Gov. Brian Kemp chipped in on Thursday.
The money was included as part of an executive order Kemp signed Thursday transferring $8.9 million from his office’s emergency fund to several areas. Much of the rest went for “crime supression efforts.”
The state’s new fiscal year begins Saturday and agencies generally give back money they don’t spend, so Kemp’s move beats that deadline.
While the cases have been going on for three decades, the cost of the water dispute has steadily risen since October 2013, when Florida asked the U.S. Supreme Court to severely limit Georgia’s withdrawals from the Chattahoochee River.
The Supreme Court in April 2021 unanimously dismissed the water rights case that Florida brought against Georgia. That suit blamed Georgia for the ecological collapse of the Apalachicola Bay following a drought.
A few months later a federal judge struck down a legal challenge to how much water Georgia gets to keep from the Chattahoochee River.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Thrash dismissed claims by the state of Alabama and multiple environmental groups that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ plan was holding back too much water in Georgia reservoirs along the upper Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin.
However, the water dispute has continued to drag on in court and run up legal bills for taxpayers.
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