Time To Get Serious

originally published March 5, 2008

You don’t often see someone dressed up like Davy Crockett, complete with frontier leggings and a coonskin cap, but that was the scene at the state capitol last week. This frontiersman was a self-styled “Tennessee Volunteer” named Matt Lea who works for Ron Littlefield, the mayor of Chattanooga, and drove a pickup truck loaded with hundreds of bottles of water to Atlanta. Littlefield was having a little fun with Georgia lawmakers who want to push the boundary line with Tennessee about a mile to the north so that our drought-parched state can tap into the bounteously flowing Tennessee River and bring a little of that water to North Georgia.

“It is feared that if today they come for our river, tomorrow they might come for our Jack Daniels or George Dickel,” Littlefield quipped in a special proclamation he had drawn up for the occasion. Therefore, “in the interest of brotherly love, peace, friendship, mutual prosperity, citywide self promotion, political grandstanding and all that,” he was declaring Feb. 27 to be “Give Our Georgia Friends a Drink Day” and sending the truck full of water down south.

The gesture was accepted with good humor, for the most part, by Georgia lawmakers. Sen. David Shafer, one of the sponsors of the border-grabbing legislation, went before the Senate to acknowledge the gift, and to recite a Native American saying he had looked up on Wikipedia.

“There is an ancient Indian proverb,” Shafer said. “Give a man a cup of water and you quench his thirst for an afternoon. Share in the waters of a great river and you quench his thirst for generations to come.”

It was all in good clean fun, of course, and injected some humor into the legislative process. Unfortunately, Georgia has some serious problems ahead with its water resources that can’t be resolved through a few media stunts like trying to move the border with Tennessee.

Our political leadership continues to operate under the illusion that Georgia should keep all the water it wants so that metro Atlanta developers can keep adding more subdivisions, strip malls and office parks to the region’s urban sprawl. That’s not going to happen because the governors of two adjoining states, Alabama and Florida, are demanding their rightful share of the water contained in Lake Lanier. (They’ve got a powerful ally on their side: the Southern Co. and its subsidiaries which need to keep the water flowing along the Chattahoochee so that their downstream power plants can continue to generate electricity.)

Gov. Sonny Perdue keeps stubbornly insisting that all the water be retained in North Georgia for his developer friends, but Alabama Gov. Bob Riley and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist keep pushing back on that idea. That’s why the tri-state water talks have gotten nowhere - which finally prompted federal Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to disclose last weekend that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and related federal entities will craft a water-sharing plan and impose it on the states. That plan, whenever it is released, could finally force Georgia’s leadership to acknowledge that we’re going to have to do things like put limits on development and implement strict water conservation measures - even if the developers and real estate agents don’t like them.

In the midst of last week’s silliness, there was actually something done along those lines. Shortly after Shafer made his speech accepting the water from Chattanooga, the state Senate voted 45-1 to pass a bill that will allow residents to use “grey water” discharged from lavatories, bathtubs and clothes washers for such purposes as household gardening, lawn watering and landscaping.

If our political leaders would cut down on the posturing and start working on other substantive ideas to conserve water, they would have a much better chance of actually addressing Georgia’s problems.

Tom Crawford

Tom Crawford is the editor of Capitol Impact’s Georgia Report, an Internet news site at www.gareport.com that covers government and politics in Georgia.