AFC Stakeholders report deserves serious attention

The phrase "making the perfect the enemy of the good" is generally attributed to Voltaire, but its truth is universal: Accepting nothing but an ideal solution more often than not results in nothing but a worse problem.

It's an argument for compromise, the imperfect but productive principle by which nobody gets everything and everybody gets something. That's the guiding principle of ACF (Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint) Stakeholders, the tri-state water management advisory group that has just released the full text of its "sustainable water management plan." (A draft summary was made public in May.)

The group, formed in 2008, has been working ever since to forge not just a truce, but a long-term pact among Alabama, Florida and Georgia, which have been waging legal and political war over the waters of the ACF basin for more than three decades.

The executive summary of the plan notes: "The regulatory arena is in flux, and litigation casts a shadow of uncertainty. It is time to turn this around."

(To which Florida's response thus far can be summed up as "See you in court." More on that in a moment.)

Georgia, in litigation with Florida, "can't comment on these topics at this time per the special master." Alabama has issued no response at all. Florida, meanwhile, has filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court requesting that ACF Stakeholders be ordered to produce "underlying hydrologic modeling efforts and associated data," which it has kept closed since the filing of the Florida-Georgia suit so as not to be drawn into that case.

The plan, as expected, urges a comprehensive, cooperative arrangement among the three states and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which last updated its Master Water Control Manual during the Eisenhower presidency. (That's not a joke. It's a fact.)

It calls, in considerable detail, for more efficient water use and return practices and for better long-term flow and drought planning. Specifically, it says the winter pool level at West Point Lake could safely be raised at least four feet, at Lake Lanier by up to two; either or both would increase storage by countless millions of gallons.

And it urges -- indeed, this argument is implicit in the group's very existence -- better reliance on better science, in a dialogue that has too often been shouted down by politics and parochial interest. (If the millions already spent on litigation could have been spent on scientifically sound water use studies, this dispute might have been resolved, or at least muted, long before now.)

Nobody, least of all the ACF Stakeholders participants themselves, expects three governors to rush together, sing "We Are the World" and start drawing up transboundary bylaws.

But this study deserves -- indeed, demands -- serious and detailed consideration. We are all stakeholders in these waters, and the last thing we need is more short-sighted politicians and profiteers making their idea of perfect the enemy of the greater good.

This story was originally published August 16, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "AFC Stakeholders report deserves serious attention."