Florida Reconsiders Water Deal with Georgia

TALLAHASSEE – Florida is cooling off on a water sharing agreement Governor Charlie Crist made earlier this month that would allow Georgia to retain millions of gallons of water to ease a potential drinking water shortage in the upstream state.

On November 1, the governors of Florida, Georgia and Alabama had met with Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and decisionmakers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the White House Council on Environmental Quality and several U.S. senators.

They agreed to a temporary compromise that would offer Atlanta, Georgia, more water from its primary source, Lake Sidney Lanier, while protecting water rights of communities and industries downstream in Alabama and Florida.

But in a statement released Friday, Florida Secretary of Environmental Protection Michael Sole said, “Florida is carefully reviewing the proposal at this time.”

“We encourage all stakeholders to review the opinion and provide feedback to safeguard the ecosystem as well as the people and the economy of Northwest Florida,” Sole said.

In a letter to federal officials released Friday, Sole said the plan to let Georgia retain more water would “starve the Apalachicola River and Bay of freshwater flows needed to keep the ecosystems, species and economy alive.”

The Apalachicola River is formed on the state line between Florida and Georgia by the confluence of the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers, which flow in from Georgia and Alabama.

In Washington, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to incrementally reduce the amount of water released from Georgia reservoirs into the Apalachicola River from 5,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 4,150 cfs and allow storage of excess inflows in the reservoirs.

The Corps issued a letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service requesting a formal consultation for the proposal.

In an unprecedented commitment on turn-around time, the Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to review the recommendation and make a ruling by November 15.

Sole said the government of Florida is waiting on that biological opinion from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service before making its final decision.

Upon his return from Washington, Governor Crist heard objections from across the state to the agreement he had made with the other two governors from people such as Tommy Ward.

Ward chairs the Oyster and Seafood Industry Task Force, appointed last year by the Franklin County Board of Commissioners. He and his family have been in the oyster business on Apalachicola Bay since 1957.

“It’s going to affect the fishing, the crabbing, the shrimping and the whole way of life down here for the seafood industry,” he told the “Gainesville Times.”

The Apalachicola Bay and estuary produces 90 percent of the oysters harvested in Florida and 13 percent of those harvested annually in the United States.

Apalachicola is home port for a fleet of offshore and near shore Gulf seafood vessels that daily bring in shrimp, grouper, and red snapper shipped to upscale restaurants all along the Eastern Seaboard.

Meanwhile in Georgia, Governor Sonny Perdue has withdrawn the state’s motion for preliminary injunction filed against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, that sought to force the Corps to retain more water in Georgia reservoirs.

“With the recent intervention by President [George W.] Bush to compel our federal partners to come to the table, I am optimistic that this matter can be resolved outside of a courtroom,” said Perdue on November 6. “I never want to resort to legal action to settle disputes, but the seriousness of this drought forced me to explore every option available to protect Georgia’s water resources.”

Georgia reserves the right to re-file this motion or file a new motion for preliminary injunction “if this new round of discussions and cooperation fails,” the governor said.