Water dispute looks court-bound

A Halloween court date is looking inevitable (and perhaps grimly appropriate) for the dispute between Georgia and Florida over the waters of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) river basin. With little more than two weeks to go before the deadline for reaching a water sharing settlement between the upstream and downstream states in this dispute, mediation efforts appear to have all but collapsed.

According to Florida’s legal team, the talks are (as they always say in courtroom dramas) hopelessly deadlocked.

In a Friday filing with the U.S. Supreme Court, reported Tuesday in the Gainesville Times, Florida states: “It currently appears unlikely that the parties will be able to amicably resolve this decades-long dispute prior to the commencement of trial.”

So unlikely, in fact, that Florida’s negotiating team announced — on very short notice, according to a Georgia brief also filed with the court — that it wouldn’t be participating in a scheduled Sept. 21 mediation session.

The outlines of the dispute are well known in the Chattahoochee Valley, which has been in the middle of the issue — quite literally — for three decades. Florida accuses Georgia of overuse of water, primarily from Lake Lanier for metro Atlanta’s consumption, to the detriment of the Florida panhandle’s marine ecology and economy, specifically the oyster industry of Apalachicola Bay. Georgia disputes that account, saying uncontrollable weather conditions and Florida’s own mismanagement of its water resources are the problem.

It could hardly have helped Florida’s case that only one team showed up on Sept. 21. (If that happened on an annual autumn Saturday in Jacksonville, the Gators would forfeit the game.)

“Georgia was disappointed by Florida’s absence at the session,” the state’s legal brief said. “However, Georgia still attended the session to meet with the mediator and believes it was productive to continue the dialogue if only with the mediator.”

If that “dialogue” wasn’t very one-sided, Georgia’s negotiating team isn’t very good.

So, barring some lottery-odds miracle breakthrough, the status of the dispute right now is “See you in court.”

‘A’ for persistence

A year after deciding (rightly, we believe) that the annual protest at Fort Benning had become diffuse and unfocused, a smaller SOA Watch contingent plans to be here as usual next month to call again for the closing of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

We still believe the group’s vilification of WHINSEC for past Central American atrocities is misguided; that a protest against U.S. foreign policy in general (which is what this event has mostly become) is more appropriate to Washington than to Fort Benning; and that despite the inevitable heckling of self-professed “patriots,” SOA Watch has every right to avail itself of the fundamental American freedom of lawful expression.

This story was originally published October 12, 2016 at 4:47 PM with the headline "Water dispute looks court-bound."