Fresh Loaf

Alabama, Florida and Georgia will not be able to meet the Feb. 15 deadline set by the White House and come to a settlement about how water would be shared among the three states, the Associated Press reports. Officials involved with the talks say they need some more time. From the article:

Officials said the states have made progress in recent months after the president sent Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to mediate a compromise as a record drought threatened Atlanta’s drinking supply. But instead of announcing a long-term pact on Friday as planned, they will offer more of a status report.

“I believe there’s a sincere effort being made,” Kempthorne said Thursday on Capitol Hill before entering a budget hearing. “I am encouraged, but I will keep pushing as well.”

Kempthorne, who said he was briefed on the talks Wednesday night, said he would wait to get details on how close the parties are before deciding whether to set a new deadline. If they remain far apart, he said, he will not.

How much more time do we need, Atlanta? I say, “two weeks,” but that’s just me, and my useless talent to remember classic scenes from Arnold Schwarzenegger films.

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From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court has thrown out an agreement that Georgia reached with the Army Corps of Engineers for water rights to Lake Lanier, handing Alabama and Florida a major victory in the states’ years-long water wars.

The agreement, which would give Georgia about a quarter of the lake’s capacity over the coming decades for drinking water, is the foundation of Georgia’s long-term plans.

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No, not you, Shelbinator.

Mysterious Mickey at Atlanta Water Shortage is pissed — I repeat, pissed — at Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby and his earmark-slippin’ ways. According to 11Alive News — and a bevy of others — the distinguished gentleman from Alabama snuck an earmark into yesterday’s pork-laden budget bill that would prevent the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from making any changes to outdated water release manuals. The article says Georgia has wanted the Corps to do just that for years, to take into account metro Atlanta’s booming growth. Alabama’s held out until the states could agree exactly how they’d share the water. From That Other Paper:

In October, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced it would start the three-year process to rewrite manuals for the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint and Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa river basins, which together supply metro Atlanta’s water. The ACF includes Lanier and drains south into Florida; the ACT includes Allatoona and drains southwest into Alabama.

Shelby’s provision would bar the agency from spending money updating the manuals unless the corps provides certain information up front, including a 25-year projection of water use in both basins.

Ladies and gentlemen, via press release, Sen. Saxby Chambliss … he’s pissed, too!

“The governors of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida are finally at the negotiating table finding a way forward on this very difficult issue,” Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said Wednesday, referring to recent water-sharing negotiations. “It is mind boggling to see this language in the omnibus bill intended to block that progress.”

The gentleman from Alabama says he’s just looking out for the health, safety and welfare of the citizens of his state. I suppose that would include Atlanta-based Southern Co., which, according to Open Secrets, was his biggest political contributer in 2006. The company’s subsidiary, Alabama Power, operates 24 power-generating facilities in the state.

According to SourceWatch, Shelby is an interesting character — friend of Big Tobacco, a holdout on a bill that cut off business ties to firms associated with Darfur, and basically an earmark-happy kind of guy.

For example, even though Shelby has put the quash on the Corps’ planned updates, he’s nonetheless gonna give it some new digs. Included in his earmarks was $5 million for what the Associated Press calls his “pet project.” The senator wants to uproot the Corps from its current field office — even though it never requested it — and then raze the riverfront spot to allow the area to be developed.

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What does 270 miles of traveling south and a day in Tallahassee get you? According to today’s meeting of the governors of Florida, Georgia and Alabama, just some more time.

Gov. Sonny Perdue trekked down to the Sunshine State’s capital to meet with Governors Charlie Crist of Florida and Bob Riley of Alabama and, according to a statement from Crist’s office, agreed to send high-level staff members to Washington, D.C., in mid-January to hammer out a deal between the three states regarding reduced water flows in the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa, and Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basins. The governors said they would then meet again in February to conclude the 17-year-old tri-state dispute over the precious resource. That deal would then be presented to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services. FWS officials would have the right to object to any changes in releases that may be harmful to endangered marine life located downstream, such as the mussels that have played such a prominent role in the entire water shortage drama.

The governors also decided today to move up to March 15 a June 1 deadline imposed by the Corps for the states to agree to a water-sharing strategy.

According to the statement from Crist’s office, “representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service also participated in today’s meeting to provide factual information on current conditions of both the ACF River Basin and the ACT River Basin.”

No word yet if David Ratcliff, chairman, president and CEO of Southern Company, was in attendance, as he was at the Nov. 1 D.C. sit-down between the governors.

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The Birmingham News reports that Alabama Gov. Bob Riley sent a letter today to President Bush asking him to deny Gov. Sonny Perdue’s recent request that the president halt the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ water releases from Lake Lanier. (Wow, that was a lot of nouns.) Riley says areas of his state were proactive in facing the oncoming water crisis and that shutting off the water would paralyze a nuclear power plant and numerous industries along the Chattahoochee — all of which rely on the resource to run efficiently. He even adds his own number to the countdown-to-doomsday clock currently ticking down to our water crisis. He says Georgia is overstating the severity of the crisis and that Lake Lanier has 260 days of water left, a number he says was confirmed by the Corps last week. That’s more than double the number I was told when I spoke with Maj. Daren Payne of the USACE’s Mobile District.

Click here for Riley’s letter to Bush.

Riley makes the point that Perdue, as of this writing, has not addressed in his talks about the drought:

“Georgia has repeatedly framed its request as a contest between people in the Atlanta area and endangered mussels in Florida. Nothing could be further than the truth….Georgia ignores the fact that the Farley Nuclear Plant sits on the banks of the Chattahoochee River and requires colling water.”

And the people down in Valdosta? The AJC’s Political Insider reports that those folks think this whole drought crisis, weather aside, is the consequence of the metro area’s penchant for rampant growth.

Here’s a caustic snippet the AJC pulled from an editorial in the Valdosta Times.

Gov. Sonny Perdue’s temper tantrums against the Army Corps of Engineers, the state of Florida and anyone else associated with not giving into his demands continued through the weekend, with meetings at Lake Lanier and declaring northern Georgia a disaster area Saturday to further enforce what everyone else has long known — Atlanta is a greedy, poorly designed behomoth of a city incapable of hearing the word “no” and dealing with it.

The wasteful ways of Atlantans continued through the past decade of severe drought in the state. The water restrictions meant little to them “up there” as they had plenty of water at the time, while rural Georgia and farmers were watching their crops burn in their fields, listening as Atlanta politicians who apparently do think their food originates in a grocery store passed policies designed to prevent them from accessing the water literally beneath their feet.

These same politicians can’t bring themselves to tell their greedy constituents complaining about the low flows in their toilets this week that perhaps if they didn’t have six bathrooms, it might ease the situation a bit. That watering your lawn isn’t as important as watering crops. Or that their greedy overbuilding has taxed their supplies of natural resources beyond their capabilities.

However, all of that requires a degree of common sense and we’ve seen precious little of it from any politician in this state this year. So South Georgia, watch out. What Atlanta wants, Atlanta gets, and right now, they want our water. If our legislative delegation wakes up, perhaps they can have the state agree to at least let us keep what falls from the sky, even while they suck our ground, and our pockets, dry.

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