Fresh Loaf

If this year’s drought doesn’t convince Georgia’s leaders to do a better job conserving water, we’ve got a bit of advice for thirsty people: Move.

Last week, the city of Atlanta laid the heaviest outdoor watering restrictions ever on metro homeowners — midnight to 10 a.m., just one day each week. And it’s not even summer yet.

Don’t blame the city, though. The real culprit — beyond the record-setting drought — is the state, whose pro-sprawl policies drain millions of gallons more each year out of the Chattahoochee and other North Georgia rivers. At this rate, the metro area’s tap could run dry in as little as six years, according to the Metropolitan North Georgia Water District.

“The kinds of things we’re doing now are the kinds of things we should have been doing 8 to 10 years ago,” says Sally Bethea, executive director of the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper. “Today, we need to do a lot more.”

While some modest conservation measures have been put in place, the water district, which is a state-chartered agency, has failed to implement conservation measures it had committed to and even backed away from effective ideas at the behest of the real-estate industry. The most notorious example: In 2006, the district ditched its plan to require many resold homes to be retrofitted with more efficient plumbing.

The district doesn’t seem at all on track to meet one of its big goals — to knock metro water use down by 11 percent from projected level by the year 2030. And, notes Shana Udvardi, water program manager for the Georgia Conservancy, “there are a lot of other cities that have had more aggressive conservation goals.”

As if on cue, the state Environmental Protection Division seems to be working on a proposal that might edge toward real conservation. It delivers a draft of a Statewide Comprehensive Management Plan to a council of state agency heads and politicians June 28; the council, in turn, is supposed to send the final plan to the General Assembly in January.

One key question is whether the state plan will bank on expensive ideas — like shuffling millions of gallons between basins and draining rivers of the water they need for wildlife – instead of focusing on reducing demand, which would be far less costly tools. For example, why not require utilities to charge water wasters higher rates than water savers?

Another question is whether the EPD, and then the council, will have the guts to press lawmakers for legislation and funding that would be necessary for any serious solutions.
“It seems like wishful thinking not to have that,” Bethea says. “We need to have teeth in this so that we know the job will be done.”

The bad news: Those agency heads on the council are beholden to Gov. Sonny Perdue, who’s not exactly been a friend of sound environmental planning.

The good news — sort of: This year’s drought looks to be so bad it could pressure Perdue and other politicians to cater to developers just a little bit less than usual.

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