Fresh Loaf

S. Heather Duncan at the Macon Telegraph has an excellent article today about the always-sexy, superhot XXX topic of “project prioritization” — in other words, what projects the state Department of Transportation decides to do and when they decide to do ‘em. An agency spokesperson says the days of “kissing the ring” — local officials would make their way to DOT’s dilapidated headquarters to beg for this or that — are over.

And if you want to know why that four-lane road that was supposed to lead you to Uncle Turbo’s Bait Shack is still unfinished, this article may give you some answers.

From the article:

When DOT Commissioner Gena Abraham took over the department nine months ago, she discovered more than 9,000 projects on the books and a $1 billion budget shortfall. Road projects that weren’t already under building contracts were put on ice until the state could reprioritize.

The department can only complete about 270 projects a year, said Mark McKinnon, a DOT spokesman.

Projects will be ranked. Those that aren’t high enough on the priority list to be completed within about six years will be eliminated, said DOT spokeswoman Crystal Paulk-Buchanan. The DOT will no longer keep projects on the books that can’t be finished for half a century, she said.

But as always, the comments give me chuckles:

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… comes from an editorial in Sunday’s Macon Telegraph. A last-minute change in the statewide water plan would allocate the resource to different parts of Georgia based on “service delivery regions” — areas that are not based on watersheds but instead on what critics call purely economic concerns and, in the words of the LaGrange Daily News, “the hydrologic equivalent of gerrymandering.” Critics are up in arms and shaking their heads with disbelief. The window for public comment on the plan is now closed; it’s now up to the Georgia Water Council to pull together the details and present it to the General Assembly next month.

The Telegraph piece echoes the voices of other outside-the-metro-region editorial boards — both literally and figuratively — and eloquently conveys the anger felt by our fellow Georgians when it comes to Atlanta’s water consumption. It also issues yet another warning to Atlanta that its growth, which has fueled its success for decades, could very well be to the detriment of both ourselves and the rest of the state.

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The statewide water plan that is being discussed — be sure to get your comments in because they close at the end of today — has thrown kerosene onto the “Atlanta-is-an-all-consuming-monster” argument that has echoed for years throughout Georgia. And a last-minute change to the plan by the state that critics viewed as sharing water based on economic needs rather than watersheds has become a chief concern among many.

In Macon last night, residents weren’t too happy.

From the Macon Telegraph:

“How can you manage water quality when you are crisscrossing river basins like that?” asked Bud Queen, president of the High Falls/Towaliga Watershed Alliance. Queen argued that such a system is unfair to Georgians living in the southern half of the state, because they won’t have a say in how water is used upstream.

Having a lot of say in how that water is used will be regional councils, and it’s who makes up those councils that concerns people. According to the draft plan, the councils will have no more than 18 members and three alternates selected from a pool of people nominated by leaders from a variety of industrial, business, environment and government groups, among others. The governor picks 10, the lieutenant governor selects 4, and the house speaker chooses 4, and each chooses one of the alternates. And it’s that odd hybrid model of people-suggestin’/guvmint-selectin’ council-building that has people angry.

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