By BENITA DODD

The Water Council has gone public across Georgia, holding town hall meetings to present to the public its draft policy recommendations on managing the state’s water quantity.

Through a mandate from the Georgia Legislature, the Water Council oversees the Environmental Protection Division’s development of a comprehensive statewide water management plan due by July 2007.

The plan’s framework is promising: It acknowledges the need for flexibility in management and it accepts that some policies and management tools can apply statewide while others may be needed where resources are stressed. It promises to be geography-specific, resource-specific, allow sub-state planning and allow for consideration of the resource’s present and future values.

But just how specific can one get? The flood of pleas by special interests placing different “values” on different aspects — from numerous river groups to canoeing to fishing and other environmental groups — indicates planners will have a tough time prioritizing as they set each watershed’s consumptive use budget. That budget is based on the water remaining for use in a sub-basin in a dry year after the amount needed to meet in-stream or in-aquifer needs and the needs of downstream users.

“Upstream interests are no more important than downstream interests,” was the comment from a representative of the Middle Chattahoochee Coalition, which claims stakeholder participants from two dozen organizations.

Conservation must be a priority and Georgians need to be given incentives and a sense of urgency, according to the Georgia Conservancy. It also called on planners to prohibit water permit transfers and not to allow inter-basin transfers “by default.”

Planners need more money and more meetings, others commented, as if dollars speed a solution and more voices bring more insight.

The problem is that all “values” and all interests are not equal. Planners must be able to prioritize water use, from economic to environmental to entertainment. Human consumption already takes precedence in crisis; environmental protections must be based on sound scientific evidence, not noisemakers.

Conservation ought to be a priority. But there is no crisis, and the situation is not “urgent.” In fact, despite announcements that Georgia is under a statewide drought, taking the state to a Level 1 plan of water use with scheduled days and hours, EPD chief Carol Couch reassured town hall participants recently that water supply is “abundant” in Georgia.

Education programs, whose grants are the lifeblood of environmental groups, will not prevent waste. Punitive and needless water restrictions promote cheating, not conservation. The appropriate approach is to ensure that water pricing motivates prudent water use.

Inter-basin water transfers are not a necessary evil. They are a vital tool that promotes balanced growth in a region and saves money on among municipalities, therefore taxpayers. By avoiding duplicative water supply infrastructure, they promote efficient water use. As old as Methuselah, such transfers occur in 25 Georgia counties — the counties that make up most of metropolitan Atlanta and house nearly 54 percent of the state’s population.

As for the paranoia over allowing the transfer of water withdrawal permits: It’s a reasonable option that needs to be on the table to develop a plan that offers environmental protection, reflects the public interest, accommodates a range of demands, dynamically adjusts to changing conditions and gives users a pocketbook incentive to efficiently use water.

Environmental protections are not threatened under a market-oriented approach; oversight would not disappear. A thriving environment is a product of a thriving economy. Water permit transfers could diversify economic opportunity across the state and redirect growth from North Georgia, location of the state’s fragile headwaters. They could make water available to more users in areas where the supply is fully allocated but not completely used.

The cost of mandates is escalating; the cost of mitigation for reservoirs is quickly becoming prohibitive. Ripping the big picture of a comprehensive statewide plan into little pieces for the sake of turf protection and placating activists who blur the lines between “needs,” “wants” and “dreams” is a serious threat to a sustainable Georgia.

Benita M. Dodd is vice president of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, an independent think tank that proposes practical, market-oriented approaches to public policy to improve the lives of Georgians.

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