Back to the water talks table?

The court case is officially over, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has issued its river flow manuals.

But the U.S. Supreme Court-appointed special master on Tuesday gave attorneys for Georgia and Florida another “last chance,” in what seems like a long series of last chances, to negotiate an agreement over the waters of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin.

The question at this point is why, given recent developments, Georgia’s legal team would be inclined to negotiate at all.

“Please settle this blasted thing,” Special Master Ralph Lancaster of Portland, Me., implored the two states in November. “I can guarantee you that at least one of you is going to be unhappy with my recommendation — and perhaps both of you.”

Lancaster has yet to issue (or at least make public) a recommendation, but the Corps has made the first part of his prediction the apparent outcome: The new manual basically gives Georgia what it wants in terms of water withdrawals, specifically from Lake Lanier, and specifically for sprawling metro Atlanta.

Waiting for word from two separate and unconnected authorities — the federal judiciary and the Corps of Engineers — has made the latest chapter in this decades-long water dispute especially curious, and almost bizarre. Decision-making processes about water allocation among three states seem to be running along parallel lines — which, by geometric definition, do not intersect.

So now that the Corps has released its manual, what impact, if any, will the special master’s recommendation to the Supreme Court — or, for that matter, any eleventh-hour agreement the states might settle on before he issues one — have at this point?

(Lawyers are doing the negotiating for the two states behind closed doors; it would be instructive if they could at least go on the record regarding that jurisdictional anomaly.)

One of the remedies Lancaster suggested in Tuesday’s order was “importation of water from outside the ACF River Basin to supplement streamflow during drought periods” — in other words, interbasin transfers.

But that doesn’t so much alleviate the problem as raise the specter of new ones: “importation” of water from where, under whose authority, at what environmental and economic impacts, and on whom? Are other drought-stricken areas willingly going to export precious water to the Chattahoochee and Flint? Not likely.

For most of this long-running saga, in a region where water had always been considered plentiful, Georgians along the Flint, and along the Chattahoochee from below Atlanta to the Alabama line, have been caught in the middle — geographically, economically and politically. Columbus, LaGrange, West Point Lake are important Georgia places that need adequate water to get not just to Atlanta, but past it. So do middle Georgia communities in and around the Flint watershed.

If there’s still a chance for further negotiations, that reality should be taken into account. If not, we’d like to call it to Mr. Lancaster’s attention before he makes his recommendation to the justices in Washington.

This story was originally published January 5, 2017 at 2:32 PM with the headline "Back to the water talks table?."