About water, but not about ‘war’
The allocation of increasingly precious water resources among Alabama, Florida and Georgia has been a sore point — economically, environmentally and politically — for more than three decades. This is most obviously the case, of course, with regard to the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin, whose waters originate in Georgia and ultimately serve all three states.
What has often been called for but seldom seen is an approach that involves more cooperation and less litigation, more decision-making based on solid science and less on power politics.
There’s no miracle cure or miraculous resolution in sight. But while the politics and legalities of the water wars will continue to be battled out in the federal courts, a recently announced federal grant will fund more of the science. And on that front, the areas affected will be working together.
A Tuesday news release from Auburn University announced a $5 million, five-year U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to be shared among four universities to research Southeastern water issues — specifically those in the Floridian Aquifer that serves approximately 10 million people in the three states. The other three universities, appropriately, are Albany State, Georgia and Florida.
The purpose of the grant, according to the AU release, is “to safeguard the sustainability of agriculture and forestry while protecting water quantity, quality and habitat in the underground Floridian Aquifer and the springs and rivers it feeds." The project, spearheaded by the Florida team, is expected to involve 14 faculty members from the four schools who “will develop a set of interactive computer models with input from farms, advocates of springs and rivers, water managers and other interested stakeholders in the region."
The idea of water use issues involving laboratories, field work and computer models instead of legislation and litigation is, at this point, a remarkably welcome one.
The right call
Former Georgia Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine has been in trouble with the state’s ethics commission ever since his 2010 gubernatorial campaign — in fact, since before that.
He’s been trying to get the courts to dismiss the case. The Georgia Court of Appeals this week became the latest one to say no.
Oxendine was subject of an ethics complaint filed in 2009 charging that two insurance companies had illegally contributed $120,000 to his campaign. That one simmered for a while; then the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported two years ago that Oxendine had kept (and spent some of) more than $500,000 in campaign contributions he had raised for the 2010 Republican gubernatorial runoff and the general election — money that should have been returned because those were races Oxendine, who was eliminated in the primary, never ran.
The big-picture concern, of course, is that if Oxendine prevails in the courts, then the state ethics commission will effectively cease to exist as an agency empowered to oversee and enforce campaign finance laws.
Oxendine’s attorneys say he intends to take his case to the state Supreme Court. We hope he will have no more success there.
This story was originally published June 28, 2017 at 5:20 PM with the headline "About water, but not about ‘war’."