Time once again to please my former Latin teacher, Brother Wallace.
Dorian Roffe-Hammond sure knows how to feed my fix for Atlanta (my favorite Southern city) and Southeast water news. He sent this opinion piece from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Jay Bookman entitled Perdue's water task force closed to the public,
I posted on Gov. Perdue's task force about a month ago.
Here is Bookman's column.
A series of major legal setbacks has finally forced Georgia officials to face reality: Metro Atlanta could actually, really, for sure and no kidding, lose its legal right to draw so much water from Lake Lanier.
The consequences could be dire. If a deal with our neighboring states can’t be cut by July 2012, it won’t be a question of trying to find enough water to support continued growth. Instead, we’ll be scrambling for enough water to supply those of us already here.
With that deadline in mind, Gov. Sonny Perdue has named a Water Contingency Task Force. The group, which held its first meeting last month at the Governor’s Mansion, is tasked with producing recommendations before the Legislature convenes in January.
According to Bert Brantley, Perdue’s spokesman, the task force is searching for options that are “the most readily available and cost-effective available, options that you can bring online as fast as possible.”
“If you had been at the Mansion, you would have heard the governor tell the task force that ‘everything is on the table,’ ” Brantley told me this week. “He told them to look at literally everything.”
Of course, I wasn’t at that meeting to hear the governor say that. You probably weren’t either, because both the press and the public were barred from attending. The task force is being funded with taxpayers’ money; it is producing recommendations that will be critical to the future of the state. But the people of Georgia, the people whose lives, property and jobs are likely to be affected, are forbidden to watch.
It’s also interesting to note the makeup of the task force. In many states, a panel created to do such important work would be thoroughly seeded with experts in the field — hydrologists, people who know water law, environmental experts, scientists. It might also have a broad range of citizens, from businesspeople to community leaders. [Oh, yeah! Emboldening mine]
But this being Georgia, the Perdue task force is dominated by corporate executives. By my count, more than 50 of its 87 members are corporate executives, bankers, developers or utility officials. Sixteen are government officials.
Just four represent environmental groups, and three of those four groups — the Nature Conservancy, the Conservation Fund and the Trust for Public Lands — are land-acquisition organizations with little expertise in water issues.
According to Brantley, the extreme overrepresentation of business interests doesn’t matter.
“You’re assuming that businesspeople can’t be environmentalists, too,” he said, repeating a line also used to excuse the dominance of business interests on the state Board of Natural Resources.
Personally, I think it’s a silly argument. It requires you to believe that personal background and perspective aren’t important in how you assess a situation. A lot of businesspeople are very smart. But I’m not sure what makes them so much more qualified than Georgians of other backgrounds to ponder this issue.
According to Brantley, the task force will look at “every possible idea you’ve seen thrown out, from desalinization to fixing pipes.” It will gauge each according to cost, yield and speed of implementation.
But will corporate executives who are by instinct averse to regulation try to downplay mandated conservation as part of the solution? Will bankers and developers naturally favor the construction of major reservoirs that would also produce thousands of lakeside lots to be sold? Will water-dependent businesses try to push the burden of conservation onto homeowners? Will real estate people oppose the idea of requiring low-flow toilets before a house can be sold?
The makeup of the task force doesn’t exactly ease such concerns. In fact, it seems designed to ensure a certain set of outcomes and preclude others. [Emboldening mine]
Concern about the direction of state policy is heightened by the sudden resignation of Carol Couch, director of the state Environmental Protection Division. Couch, a scientist with a background in hydrology and biology who had been deeply involved in water issues, quit unexpectedly last month with just a week’s notice and without real explanation. She was quickly replaced by Allen Barnes, a law partner at King and Spalding, which often represents corporate interests in environmental cases.
The task force’s job is very important, and its membership includes a lot of good people. But the closed process and membership betray the same value system that helped to create this mess in the first place.
Last month I suggested that the task force was weighted towards the type of people who helped get Atlanta into its current predicament. Bookman's correct; these shovers and makers are not going to get the job done, especially behind closed doors.
Next time Sonny prays for rain, he might try praying for transparency and buy-in from the rest of the stakeholders.
"We don't give a damn how you done it up North." -- favorite bumper sticker seen throughout the South