A late re-entry in water fray

Alabama officials have always known which way the rivers were flowing. As far as the most recent battle in the water wars goes, it seems they wanted to wait and see which way the winds were blowing.

They’ve apparently seen enough. With the trial in Florida’s U.S. Supreme Court suit against Georgia over flow levels in the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers just days away, Alabama has filed a friend-of-the-court brief aligning itself with Florida and calling for a cap on upstream consumption during drought periods, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Tuesday.

It has long been an intriguing question, with many possible answers, why Alabama — a major stakeholder, to put it mildly, in not one but two river basins that originate in Georgia — has so far remained on the sidelines. Maybe, with pressing political concerns of its own (one of the two top officials in the state’s legislative branch has already been booted out of office, the head of its judicial branch is perhaps about to be, and the chief executive could soon follow), the state was content to let Florida do the expensive grunt work for a while.

Now, with efforts at a negotiated Georgia-Florida settlement apparently exhausted, Alabama officials have decided (unarguably) that their state’s interests lie in adequate amounts of water getting downriver, not in making sure Atlanta has enough to grow indefinitely. Hence the eleventh-hour reenlistment.

Alabama won an earlier court challenge against the Corps of Engineers on grounds that water supply for Atlanta was never one of Lake Lanier’s specified purposes; that decision was later overturned by a federal appellate court.

Now, with the state officially throwing its support behind Florida, Alabama attorneys wrote: “As the population of metropolitan Atlanta has grown, Georgia largely has chosen not to invest its resources in reservoirs and other infrastructure that would facilitate the area’s water-supply demands.”

Georgia’s defense — for which, the AJC reports, Gov. Nathan Deal has set aside some $24 million in legal fees just this year — is that Florida’s woes are attributable to weather conditions and its own resource mismanagement, not upstream overconsumption.

A footnote: Alabama’s friend-of-the-court brief, the Journal-Constitution reported, does not imply it is the state’s last word on the matter. Quite the contrary: Even a decision largely favorable to Florida “would not preclude Alabama from filing its own equitable apportionment action against Georgia should the need arise in the future,” attorney’s wrote. Which of course means — not that anybody really thought otherwise — that all this is far from over.

Meanwhile, as coastal Georgia continues to clean up and rebuild from a hurricane and the rains that accompanied it, the rest of the state remains parched. Maybe it’s not too much of a stretch to infer that as long as people can’t or won’t figure this water problem out, nature isn’t inclined to make it any easier for us.

This story was originally published October 26, 2016 at 6:21 PM with the headline "A late re-entry in water fray."