On the banks of the Coosa River, a quick paddle downstream from where the Oostanaula’s muddy water flows into the clear Etowah, Mary Kimbrough and Macie McCain recently finished the second annual Polar Bear Paddle, climbed out of their kayaks and pondered the prospect of metro’s growing thirst 70 miles to the southeast. The two women are partners in a new rental kayak business in Floyd County.
McCain, 65, recently read that Atlanta is getting 500 new tech jobs. “I don’t agree with bringing in more businesses [to Atlanta] when they don’t have water.”
“Water or the [congested] highways,” added Kimbrough, 53.
“It’s already overcrowded,” McCain said.
“In South Georgia, the economy’s the pits and Atlanta’s still growing. They need to share the wealth. We’ve got plenty of land in the state,” Kimbrough said. “Why does [the growth] all have to be inside 285?”
The state water plan ratified by large margins in the General Assembly on Friday is supposed to calm the fear many Georgians outside metro Atlanta hold as fact: The ever-sprawling capital region wants to pipe the water from outlying rivers and lakes to keep the growth machine humming along.
That decades-old perception persists despite a 2001 law prohibiting exactly that. The region’s leaders have fueled the fear with even more far-fetched ideas, including piping desalinated water from the coast.
At a Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce water summit last month, state Rep. Lynn Smith (R-Newnan), chairwoman of the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee, tried to make the region’s business leaders understand how deep fear and loathing of the state’s most-populated region runs in nonmetro residents, especially when the issue is water.
“Do you all have your straws with you? Straws to stick in the water around the state?” Smith asked. “If you don’t realize you’re the enemy, just look around, because that’s how the rest of the state sees you.”
In recent weeks, newspaper opinion columns and political cartoons from around the state echoed a chorus of concern that the state water plan will only make it easier for metro Atlanta to take their regions’ water. An editorial in the Savannah Morning News last month summed up the sentiments: “A long-awaited, statewide water plan that’s supposed to help slake North Georgia’s thirst and provide long-term solutions looks less like a relief package and more like a mirage.
“Worse, it could threaten this end of Georgia, if Atlanta is allowed to swipe water from the Savannah River.”
An Augusta Chronicle editorial earlier this month hit even harder: “The [Central Savannah River Area] long has been under the covetous gaze of metro Atlanta, which is guzzling about 200 million gallons a day out [of] the Chattahoochee River that it isn’t putting back. These days, for drought-stricken Atlanta, the Savannah River is looking mighty good.”
The criticism was loud enough to prompt Gov. Sonny Perdue to resort to a phrase made infamous by the first President Bush.
“Look closely, and read my lips. You have nothing to fear,” said Perdue, according to the Augusta newspaper.
Last week , state Environmental Protection Division Director Carol Couch, who has shepherded the water plan for nearly three years, had a wordier response for critics during a House committee hearing.
“Representation that the plan provides a lock box %26mdash; an opportunity %26mdash; for the metro Atlanta region to take a first drink of Georgia’s water and leave everybody else high and dry is simply wrong,” Couch said. “I don’t know how plainer I can be.”
Despite the overwhelming majority to ratify the state plan on Friday %26mdash; 131 to 37 %26mdash; the House is expected to reconsider its vote Jan. 28, giving critics more time to lobby against it.
Politics aside, the metro Atlanta region can live and grow on the water within its boundaries, without importing new sources, said Aris Georgakakos, director of the Georgia Water Resource Institute at Georgia Tech.
“We can live within our means” for another 50 years, Georgakakos said. He’s worked on water management disputes around the world, including the tri-state water war among Georgia, Alabama and Florida.
In truly water-stressed parts of the globe, per capita water use is a fraction of the 70 to 80 gallons a day used here, he said. If the region pursues aggressive water conservation using the latest technologies and builds new, well-planned reservoirs, “why are we thinking there is a limit?” Georgakakos asks.
State officials and business leaders say good management begins with the water plan. But the work is only beginning.
The plan calls for a three-year study of the state’s rivers, lakes and underground aquifers to determine just how much water can be removed and how much treated sewage returned without ruining the resource. In his budget proposal to the Legislature, Gov. Perdue set aside $11.1 million to start the assessments, which are expected to cost about $36.5 million.
Once the study is done, the state EPD and newly created regional water districts will use the information along with population projections to divide the available water among cities, farms and industries.
The details will be left largely to district boards, each with 25 members appointed by the governor, lieutenant governor and House speaker.
The plan does not do what many around the state hoped it would %26mdash; give downstream communities the same seat at the table as the upstream communities who use the water first.
That’s largely due to the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District, a 16-county region crossing six river basins, created by state law in 2001. With about half the state’s population organized around an economic region for water planning, coming up with boundaries that follow river boundaries for the rest of the state was nearly impossible, officials said.
What they created instead is a hybrid, grouping counties as close to the river basins as possible while paying attention to political and economic ties.
Chris Clark, executive director of the Georgia Environmental Facilities Authority who helped draw the lines, said water assessments will still be based on watersheds, forcing the districts to work together to share common resources.
“Mother Nature rules,” Clark said. “We’re not creating water czars.”
Even so, the Atlanta region already moves water from one river basin to the other, including a net loss of 55 million gallons of water a day from the Chattahoochee %26mdash; metro’s most vulnerable river. That’s because metro counties spread across five major watersheds, and water taken out of one basin is often transported across ridge lines and discharged into another basin.
Every day, the Etowah River sends 23 million gallons of water to metro Atlanta that doesn’t come back, according to the EPD. The Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority pulls the water from Lake Allatoona, upstream from Rome, then distributes it to homes and businesses. The water winds up in the Cobb sewer system, some of which is discharged back to Allatoona. The rest goes in the Chattahoochee River.
That donation is expected to more than double by 2030. With normal rainfall, Rome and others who depend on the Etowah won’t even notice.
During a severe drought like the current one, some are concerned the water transfer will start to feel like a siphon.
Joe Cook, executive director and Riverkeeper of the Coosa River Basin Initiative, a river watchdog group for the watershed that includes the Etowah, said “Atlanta’s already got a straw in the Etowah. The fear of Atlanta up here’s not some hypothetical scenario, some paranoid fear.
“It’s real.”
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drought,
water districts,
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