Fresh Loaf

Number of tornado warnings issued last Tuesday in metro Atlanta because of Tropical Storm Fay: 5

Gallons of rain the tempest added to Lake Lanier, the metro area’s main source of drinking water: 22 billion

Number of days that additional water can last metro Atlanta: 50

Inches Lake Lanier rose last Monday and Tuesday thanks to the storm: 30

Number of feet the lake is still below full level: 15

Average number of gallons released daily from Lake Lanier this month: 1.2 billion

Number of years since the lake’s level has been that low: 52

Gallons that could be saved if pre-1993 metro Atlanta homes replaced their antiquated plumbing fixtures: 183 million

Percentage of respondents in a recent poll who said they were less concerned about the drought this year than they were in 2007: 48

Sources: Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Rasmussen Reports, Metropolitan North Georgia Water District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

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The Fulton Daily Report has a great story on how legal battles between states — such as the long-running brouhaha between Georgia, Florida and Alabama — are becoming more common across the nation.

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The following e-mail and photo came to CL from Alex W., a self-described “Lifetime Water Drinker” in southern Indiana. Alex is worried we’re not taking our drought seriously.

Greetings,
I was shopping with friends in the local WalMart store
here in Southern Indiana when I came upon a pretty
bottle of water. My interest in where exactly people
were getting this “safer” source of water lead me to
inspect the label.

My jaw dropped as I read, (more…)

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Proving that there is no fighting in the war room, the state Senate huddled up together and unanimously passed a resolution that would effectively make Georgia look like a bunch of fools and piss Tennessee off at the same time.

The resolution, introduced by Sen. David Shafer, R-Duluth, calls for a committee to study whether a 190-year-old surveying error mislabeled the border between the two states, and if so, what legal claims Georgia has to annex it. Why do we suddenly care? Legislators say the error robbed us of access to billions of gallons of rich water flowing through the Tennessee River.

State Rep. Harry Geisinger, R-Roswell, introduced a companion resolution in the House, which has yet to hear a vote. Word around the Capitol and in my gut says that’ll pass just as easily.

So there you have it. Solving the water crisis the General Assembly way: Committee your way into someone else’s land and stick a straw in their river.

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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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Nevermind the fact that he used his political-might to circumvent the state required 30-day waiting period… Another example of him manipulating the system for personal gain.

— Commenter Shrike071 on news that Speaker Glenn Richardson seems to have used personal pull to initiate and complete a divorce in a single day. State law requires a 30-day waiting period for uncontested divorces.

His divorce records are sealed for now, so it’s not yet clear whether Richardson’s divorce has anything to do with allegations last year that he’d been laying pipe* with an attractive lobbyist for the gas industry.

—–

We’re already at war with Alabama and Florida over water, so why not also Tennessee?

— The McGehee Zone on a nascent effort in the state Senate to “correct” Georgia’s border with Tennessee, thus giving Georgia access to the Tennessee River. Them swimmin’ holes don’t fill up by themselves, y’all.

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Motherfucker. We apologize for the language, but there is no better way to reflect our feelings upon learning that TAD money cannot be used for the Beltline.

— Raleigh Urbain at Inside the Sprawl on a Supreme Court ruling that nixes the Beltline’s funding mechanism.

City officials will hold a press conference at 1 p.m. 2 p.m. at City Hall to discuss the court’s ruling. It’s not clear yet if Mayor Franklin will be there. According to her office, she just got back from India and had planned to take the day off.

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Editorial boards of Georgia newspapers outside metro Atlanta have harshly criticized the recently passed statewide water plan.

“Georgia lawmakers have wasted an opportunity to craft an elegant statewide water plan that would have required fewer fixes in the future.”

— Savannah Morning News, Jan. 22.

“In this instance [Gov. Sonny Perdue, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and state House Speaker Glenn Richardson], were peddling the statewide water plan, which is going up for legislative endorsement on a very, very fast track despite almost every written opinion about declaring it to be an insult to both common sense and Mother Nature.”

— Rome News-Tribune, Jan. 18

“What actually has been sliced, however, is the influence of the 143 counties outside the 16-county metro Atlanta region when it comes to how water will be allocated within Georgia.”

— Albany Herald, Jan. 20

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What’s bound to happen to the state’s first-ever comprehensive water plan? Even though both the state House and Senate Environment and Natural Resources committees have met, it’s still too early to tell.

State Environmental Protection Director Carol Couch, appearing before Senate and House environment committees last night and this morning, respectively, worked to dispel the “myths” about the water plan. This wasn’t a “water grab” by metro Atlanta, she said, but an effort to “[create] a level playing field.” The 25-member councils in each water-planning district were not, as Georgia Environmental Facilities Authority Executive Director Chris Clarke put it, “water czars.” The councils would merely act as liaisons between the state and municipalities. And the plan, as Couch, Clarke, and many members of the Legislature have said, is not a “lock box,” but a “living document” that is subject to tinkering and adjustment.

The environmental community isn’t sold on the idea, and, frankly, wouldn’t mind if the plan’s rubber teeth morphed into fangs. Gil Rogers of the Southern Environmental Law Center spoke at both hearings on behalf of the Georgia Water Coalition and outlined the vagaries of the three-year effort. He says the plan’s language is lax — too many sentences include “should” rather than “shall.” Some river basins, as outlined in the plan, travel through several proposed districts. The Chattahoochee basin, for example, is divided by three. If disputes between districts arise, how would they be resolved? How the plan addresses such a concern is “anemic” at best, Rogers says

The business community loves the product of the three-year effort that, according to EPD’s Couch, included a strong amount of public input. Name a business interest or organization that banks on an ample water supply — home builders, industry, agribusiness, chambers of commerce — and they stood before the committees to give their blessing. And as one environmentalist put it after last night’s two-hour meeting, “Funny how the people who got us into all this mess are the ones saying they love [the plan].” Missing from those expressions of adoration: Utility companies such as Southern Co., which according to the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, gobble up a healthy portion of the state’s water.

The Senate committee voted unanimously in favor of a resolution supporting the plan. The House committee delayed a vote but may hold one at its next meeting, Thursday morning at 8:30. Word around the Gold Dome today is that Senate Republicans have concerns over the 11 water-planning districts presented to them. The regions are decided on county lines, not river basins, as environmentalists, scientists and many others have urged. There are also mumblings about a push for criteria regarding interbasin transfers — the second most widely criticized aspect of the plan and the one that worries downstream communities the most — be written into law. But with the issue’s urgency, such a move may not even budge.

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Tomorrow at 9 a.m. in the Maloof Auditorium, the DeKalb County Commission is set to hear — for the umpteenth time — the controversial ordinance requiring homes built before 1993 being sold in the county to be retrofit with low-flow fixtures prior to closing. The measure was hit hard by the real estate industry and has gone through several revisions, such as taking into account houses set to be razed and deciding exactly who — the Realtors, the resident, the closing attorney, etc. — should be responsible for ensuring such changes have been made. The fight’s been fought before, last time in the General Assembly, and the measure was squashed by the same folks who are fighting it now. Environmentalists are urging state legislators to pursue conservation bills when the session starts next week, and this DeKalb ordinance scuttlebutt could very well be a micro version of what you’d see go down in the Gold Dome.

Now, keep in mind that it’s “on the agenda,” as I was corrected just a minute ago by Kristie Swink, DeKalb’s public information officer, who said that the commission “will vote” on the ordinance is not the correct terminology — especially after it’s been deferred time and time again.

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The Kremlinologists over at Insider Advantage posted a news report that should bring some holiday cheer to critics of the statewide water plan. The Georgia Water Policy Council, under pressure from environmental groups and local governments, decided on Friday to hold off giving the plan its final blessing until after the new year. Critics disagreed with a last-minute change made by the state Environmental Protection Division that draws district boundaries according to county lines rather than watersheds. The agency has also come under fire for how members of the regional water-planning bodies would be selected. According to the current draft, candidates would be nominated by local power brokers from a variety of industries and sectors, and then hand-picked by the governor, lieutenant governor and House speaker.

The report says the vote is set for Jan. 8, which, according to my research two weeks ago, was the date all along. Oh well. Viva agua!

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If things go the way David Stooksbury predicts, prepare for a dry summer in 2008. The Athens Banner-Herald reports that the state’s climatologist told a group gathered at the University of Georgia’s Driftmier Engineering Center that while recent rains have helped the parched region, we’ve received less than half what we normally see this time of year.

“That means we are not receiving the recharge that is needed at this time of year for next summer. That is a big concern,” he said.

Stooksbury had already predicted a La Nina effect would bring the Southeast a drier and warmer winter. The Banner-Herald reports the climatologist saying that soil in Middle and coastal Georgia is drier. Even with reservoirs getting a jolt from the rain, streams and groundwater levels are lower. Since late September, the drought’s reach has spread farther south and closer to the coast. (Visit the Banner-Herald article to view an animation of the drought’s spread.)

That doesn’t exactly bode well according to what hydrologist Dan Sheer said last week to a meeting of the Metropolitan North Georgia Water District at the Atlanta Regional Commission. He said that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ reduced releases from Buford Dam have helped slow dwindling lake levels, but that those releases are set to change June 1.

“If the [reduced releases] expire in June and we have a repeat of last year, the reservoirs would dip into dead storage near the middle of September,” he said. “Lake levels would be reduced by 15 percent.”

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Water management a la personal finance:

“You don’t have to be a banker to know that if you spend 75 percent of your savings, and then all of your income, you’ll soon become bankrupt,” said Dan Sheer, a bearded and expressive Maryland hydrologist.

That was the analogy Sheer dropped to illustrate the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ mismanagement of water resources during a meeting yesterday of top water planners and experts at the Atlanta Regional Commission. Sheer, who has been working with King and Spalding, the district’s legal counsel, was one of several speakers who briefed members of the Metropolitan North Georgia Water District on the water-shortage situation as well as an update of the 18-year legal proceedings among Georgia, Florida and Alabama.

And the dominant message of the afternoon was clear: “Don’t blame Atlanta. Blame the Corps.”

(more…)

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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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Congratulations, 61 counties of drought-addled Georgia — you’ve conserved 348 million gallons each day, or enough water to serve 1.7 million homes! Them be the facts spoken by Gov. Sonny Perdue during a press conference today in his office at the Capitol.

In mid-October, Perdue demanded all permit holders reduce their water use by 10 percent compared to an average of their use from the previous year. Permit holders are users such as utility providers, industries and municipalities that use more than 100,000 gallons of water per day. The governor said today that since the demand, just under half — 46 out of 97 permit holders — met that goal. DeKalb County and the city of Atlanta