Fayette County Commission Chairman Jack Smith is a member of the state Water Contingency Planning Task Force charged with finding solutions to Georgia’s mandate by federal Judge Paul Manguson in July to reduce water levels in Lake Lanier by sending an additional 250 million gallons per day of Chattahoochee River water downstream to Alabama and Florida by 2012. Smith said any decision, at least for the short-term, is not expected to effect Fayette County’s water supply.

First appointed by Gov. Sonny Perdue in October, the second meeting of the task force held Nov. 23 produced a wealth of proposed options and their sub-parts that included more than a dozen potential ways to conserve water, to capture additional water through new and expanded reservoirs and quarries, additional aquifer storage methods and projects such as the construction of a desalination plant near Savannah and to control water transfers across portions of metro Atlanta and north Georgia.

Each of the options and their subsections comes with both a price factor and an estimated timeline.

Smith said there should be no short-term impact on Fayette County. The task force interbasin water transfer data provided Nov. 23 shows that Fayette receives only 100,000 gallons per day from the transfer of water from the Chattahoochee River to the Flint River. Unlike Fayette, it is the counties in north metro Atlanta, especially Gwinnett, Forsyth, DeKalb and Fulton, that will be hit hard by the water reduction.

As for the long-term impact for Fayette, Smith said that potential is not currently known.

“One of the long-term proposals is to create a inter-connected water transfer system for metro Atlanta,” Smith said. “If so, it would probably be 2025 before it could be physically implemented. If that’s the case all the water from every county would flow into the transfer system.”

One of the questions posed by Smith to the task force asked how counties that have planned for their development and made provisions for their future would be protected in the long-term. He was told the task force would have to take those provisions into account when devising a final document.

Citing the various proposed options, Smith said the most logical approach, based on preliminary information, would be to fill the need for additional reservoirs and water storage areas north of Atlanta. The question then becomes where to locate those facilities without having them overlap into the Lake Lanier drainage areas.

Concerning likely task force recommendations, Smith said they should be numerous.

“I think we’ll see an encyclopedia of methods to provide water, with associated costs. And those methods will be attacked in several phases,” he said. “The water problem is not unsolvable. But it is unsolvable before the judge’s deadline.”

While any impending action will likely not have a short-term effect on Fayette County, the same cannot be said for much of metro Atlanta. One or more, and perhaps many more, of the options being scrutinized by the task force will need to be enacted by 2012 unless Congress intervenes and Lake Lanier is authorized to serve as a water supply source for metro Atlanta. Otherwise, metro Atlanta will only be able to withdraw the amount of water not seen since the 1970s, an estimated equivalent of 250 million gallons per day.

Smith is one of more than 80 local and state government, corporate and conservation non-profit members that make up the task force. The final report of the task force is expected in mid-December.

“It’s virtually impossible to meet the 2012 deadline for alternate water sources,” Smith said. “So we have to (develop) some kind of blueprint to lay before the court to show progress in meeting or heading in the direction of the goal of 250 million gallons per day.”