Wednesday, July 9, 2003

July 16 in PTC: Welcome to water wars?

By DENNIS CHASE

Everything you ever wanted to know about water, wastewater treatment and watershed management is about to be delivered to you in three pretty reports. At least that is what the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District would have you believe. I suggest, however, when you attend their public meeting next Wednesday, July 16, you view their "dog and pony show" with serious skepticism.

I know how this sounds to you, but please attend. These are very serious issues and they will become more difficult with each year that passes. If you fail to make your concerns known, someone in downtown Atlanta will make the decisions for you! And those decision-makers do not worry very much about the small communities around Atlanta.

· If you wonder why some groups are not addressed, (think forestry, agriculture, utilities and others) you are not alone.

· Are you wondering who will pay for all of this? You know! But where are the numbers?

· Ever become suspicious when the numbers come out exactly as predicted? Especially in a case like this when they don't know the base numbers to begin with. Amazing stuff!

· Final decisions, as well as enforcement, will come from Georgia Environmental Protection Division. But they still don't have enough staff to keep up, so how can this really work?

· Once the plan is approved, there seems to be no avenue for public input. The cities and counties will be required to do the work, mostly by hiring consultants ($$s), and downtown Atlanta will give its blessing, maybe.

· Even though research available from the Environmental Protection Agency has described health concerns for water re-use in some circumstances, there is nothing regarding health concerns in the reports. Anyone want to play golf on a course watered with sewage?

· Around the edges of metro Atlanta, construction continues on new Land Application System (LAS) type sewage treatment systems while the reports are recommending that LAS be phased out and replaced with centralized systems. Confused? Me, too.

· If you find yourself wondering about some of the basic assumptions for the studies, you will have lots of company.

· If you fail to question some of the strange logic presented, you are listening too closely to their fine spin on things.

All over this country, our once limitless supply of water is fast becoming history. And this is especially true for clean water, which is disappearing even faster.

The Water District was established by Georgia General Assembly in 2001, to find a way to protect these valuable resources and ensure that everyone has an equal chance at the available resources. From the beginning, many of us worried that a few governments and businesses would take their share first and little guys would wonder about the decisions of their upstream neighbors.

The decisions will probably be made the way they want anyway, but without you, it will be much worse. Along with a number of your friends and neighbors, I participated in meetings of a citizen advisory group known as the Flint River Basin Advisory Council. Beginning shortly after the Board of Directors was established for the Water Planning District, the Flint River group met numerous times and reviewed numerous stages of three reports that are now in the Draft Report which will be presented at the public meeting on Wednesday, July 16.

Our council worked very hard to make sure our concerns were heard. And thankfully, some very good things did happen. My concern is that the final documents and decisions still need improvement and there is still a danger of losing the good things.

Earlier, I suggested a few areas you need to examine closely. There are others I know I missed. If you understand budgets, funding methodology and planning for large scale projects (think $10 to $30 billion here), then your help is especially vital.

Taken strictly as it was written, the Georgia General Assembly is looking for answers to a large number of very difficult questions. There were times during the plan development process where presentation of citizen ideas appeared to be headed toward a few answers. However, it is my opinion that the current set of three draft reports does not provide what the General Assembly requested.

During a recent visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I saw a bumper sticker that suggests where we may be headed. It says something like this: "When they stop watering the golf course, I will stop watering my garden!" Even in the Southwest, where water has been a huge problem for over a hundred years, they still bow to the special interest uses. The Southeast hasn't reached that point, at least not yet.

Watch these pages next week for a discussion of concerns about water quality and related environmental issues.