Curious twist on years-old water conflict

You might have heard about a furious debate involving a powerful government agency’s missing emails, and what they might or might not reveal.

No, not that one. This one involves issues closer to home — a lot closer — than Benghazi, and it doesn’t involve Hillary Clinton. (At least not yet.)

What this flap involves is so close to home, in fact, that you can stroll down to the Riverwalk and toss a rock into it.

In the long-running interstate feud over the quality and quantity of water in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint rivers, and how that quality and quantity affects people over the length and breadth of that river system from the north Georgia mountains to the Gulf of Mexico, Georgia and Florida are currently (no pun intended) the primary opponents. Alabama, though obviously a major Chattahoochee stakeholder, is for whatever reasons a noncombatant in this particular campaign.

The other two states are involved — both in negotiations and in a Supreme Court fight. The latter involves Florida’s contention, as reported Tuesday in the Gainesville (Ga.) Times, that “the email accounts of at least three personnel, including one former [Georgia] Environmental Protection Division director, ‘had been deleted or otherwise destroyed.’”

Florida filed a notice March 4 seeking further information, including the retrieval of the missing communications. Georgia responded that it was “assessing” Florida’s request, but according to Florida court filings, would not “make a witness available for … topics related to the issue of deleted data.”

One thing this development does have in common with the more familiar national story is that the side with the missing emails insists it’s a non-issue, while the side demanding the emails insists it’s central to the story: “Florida believes the missing emails are likely to be highly relevant to proving Georgia’s inequitable conduct in this case.” The Congress-State Department flap, of course, hasn’t gone on nearly as long as the water wars. (At least not yet.)

Georgia’s court response said the state did not produce a witness because “the email accounts of three former EPD Directors who departed EPD at various points over the past 15 years … were overbroad, not relevant, substantially burdensome and unrelated to the merits of this case.”

Maybe. Ralph Lancaster, the Maine attorney who serves as a Supreme Court-appointed special master in this matter, said there is “no allegation that Georgia has acted in bad faith,” and that the state EPD has made numerous attempts to retrieve emails from an old server that has since been replaced.

Whether the emails were deliberately “deleted or otherwise destroyed” to deep-six information about possible water-use agendas that high-ranking Georgia officials would just as soon not make public, or were merely the result of routine data dumps or replacement of obsolete equipment is the obvious question Florida raises. Georgia’s refusal to even produce a witness to respond to the question will appear to many, fairly or not, as if the state is essentially taking the Fifth.

So far — officially at least — Florida is framing the issue as mostly just asking, not accusing. At least not yet.

This story was originally published March 16, 2016 at 5:12 PM with the headline "Curious twist on years-old water conflict."