After building the Lake Lanier reservoir in 1960, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers helped transform it into something for which it was never intended: the Atlanta region’s main source of drinking water.
Court records show the Corps repeatedly permitted local governments to withdraw water from the federal reservoir, even though Congress didn’t authorize its construction for that purpose. Meanwhile, the region’s population — and its demand for water — grew rapidly to the point where more than 3 million people depend on drinking water from the lake today.
But the fate of the region’s water supply now is in question after a federal judge issued a stinging ruling in the tri-state water rights war this month that says the Corps’ actions were illegal. The judge is giving Congress three years to decide how the reservoir should be used before tightening the spigot at the lake to levels from the mid-1970s, when Atlanta was a fraction of its size.
Critics say the Corps helped push the region into this crisis by giving into local political pressure for drinking water as the area developed and generated more tax revenues. One of those critics compared the Corps and the Atlanta region’s relationship to that of a pusher and an addict.
“Who is responsible, the Corps for facilitating demand or the local water providers for their ever-increasing demands?” said George W. Sherk, who wrote about the reservoir’s legislative history when he was a visiting associate professor at Georgia State University and who now teachers water law at the Colorado School of Mines. “The Corps’ failure to understand that there were limitations on its authority was a factor in creating the problem we have today.”
Brig. Gen. Todd Semonite, who took over command of the Corps’ South Atlantic Division on May 1, was out of town training and not available for comment last week, said his spokesman.
“The Corps acted in good faith,” said Corps spokesman Rob Holland. “Our goal has always been to be even-handed and — insofar as we could — accommodate what people wanted and needed within the law.”
In his ruling in the nearly 20-year-old legal dispute among Georgia, Alabama and Florida, U.S. District Court Judge Paul A. Magnuson said the Corps should have known better. And he highlighted the Corps’ inconsistent actions.
The Corps, for example, rejected a water supply request from Gwinnett County during the Buford Dam’s construction in 1955, saying the withdrawals could affect the reservoir’s original purposes as authorized by Congress: power generation, flood-control and navigation.
But it entered into contracts in the 1970s and 1980s, allowing Gwinnett County and Cumming to withdraw tens of millions of gallons of water from the lake. The Corps also entered into a contract with the Atlanta Regional Commission in the 1980s, the judge wrote, to release more downstream for drinking water customers in Cobb, DeKalb, and Fulton counties and Atlanta.
Then in 2002 — after the tri-state legal battle began — the Corps responded to another Georgia water-supply request, saying it could not grant the request without congressional approval, the judge wrote.
Also, the Corps wrote an operating manual for the reservoir about 50 years ago that does not include water supply among its “major uses,” the judge said.
Erwin Topper, who served as the operations manager for the reservoir and Buford Dam when the contracts were approved in the 1980s, said those decisions were made at a higher level than him.
“Water supply contracts are not negotiated at the local level but — with input from local managers — are finalized and negotiated in the Mobile District Office of the Corps of Engineers,” said Topper, who worked at the reservoir from 1983 to 2004.
Lisa Coghlan, a spokeswoman for the Mobile district office, said the Corps acted believing it had authority under the federal Water Supply Act to permit the withdrawals from the lake.
Magnuson said the Corps doesn’t deserve all the blame for region’s dilemma.
“Too often, state, local and even national government actors do not consider the long-term consequences of their decisions,” Magnuson wrote in his 96-page ruling. “Local governments allow unchecked growth because it increases tax revenue, but these same governments do not sufficiently plan for the resources such unchecked growth will require.”
From the time the reservoir was completed in 1960 to last year, the population in the five counties that depend at least in part on Lake Lanier or the Chattahoochee River for drinking water grew by 2.2 million, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission.
Labels: drinking water, Lake Lanier, lake lanier water
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Brian Vanderhoff @ 8:56 AM
