Area forum addresses statewide water plan

January 29, 2008
By Andrea Freygang, Rome News-Tribune, staff writer

Rome, Georgia -- As the statewide water plan heads to the governor’s desk for approval, it is still considered by many to be incomplete, including three panelists who spoke at a Rome forum Monday night.

The forum, sponsored by Coosa River Basin Initiative and attended by about 50 people, was designed to help answer questions about the future of water supplies in the state of Georgia.

Click here for a video report from the meeting.

The panelists were Neill Herring, longtime environmental lobbyist at the Georgia State Capitol; Benita Dodd, vice president of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation; and Mark Crisp, an engineer and long-time water expert with C.H. Guernsey.

While providing differing perspectives, all three criticized parts of the water districting approved in the statewide water plan by Georgia’s Senate and House last week.

Herring criticized how the plan switches from planning based on the natural water basin system to delegated regions.

“This water plan is a disaster,” Herring said. “Now every three years we have a plan ... and it will be three years of unrestrained growth in Atlanta with no change in water management policy … that should be based on the basins God supplied us with as we take a look at the problem we’re careening into.”

Herring said the water regions should follow natural watershed basins.

But Dodd, while agreeing with Herring about this point, said the process is only beginning and she trusts Carol Couch, director of Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division, to pull the water council members (appointed by the governor and speaker of the house) together.

“We need to see what the process looks like. There’s a long way to go with the plan and we have to start somewhere,” she said, adding concerns about funding conservation and infrastructure needs for water. “It could be $2.35 billion for infrastructure/maintenance for the next 20 years, but (water) revenues are down thanks to conservation, so it’s a catch-22, and we need to look at conservation pricing.”

Crisp said the methods dealing with the water crisis need to be diverse, with different options, but said desalinization is too expensive at current prices/usage, adding reservoirs would just shift storage, but not add more water — only Mother Nature can do that.

“But I don’t like interbasin transfer … because any depletion is a problem,” said Crisp.

Citing that, Herring urged attendees to support legislation state Rep. Preston Smith, R-Rome, is co-sponsoring to put “meaningful regulation on interbasin transfers and draw plan lines based on watershed.”

Smith has also introduced legislation that would provide an oversight committee for the statewide water plan in addition to the water council appointed by the state.