Alabama’s Sessions spars with corps, Georgia in ‘water wars’… | www.myajc.com

WASHINGTON — Georgia is winning the tri-state “water wars,” and Alabama Republican U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions is none too pleased about it.

The former federal prosecutor spent an hour and a half Monday building a case, bit by bit, that the Army Corps of Engineers has been hopelessly biased in favor of thirsty metro Atlanta and it’s high time for Congress to intervene.

Even as Sessions said he was encouraged by some of the corps’ comments and a public airing of the issue, he admitted the hearing was not likely to produce a new bill.

“They’ve gotten what they wanted,” Sessions said of Georgia. That’s been true from the court system to the halls of Congress, of late, in the latest twists in the multi-decade H2O struggle.

Sessions chaired the Environment and Public Works Committee hearing, as the committee’s real leaders were nowhere to be found on a sleepy Monday with no votes scheduled and most senators lingering in their home states.

Georgia Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, who have been deeply involved in the water wars jousting, sat sentry in the front row, but they don’t serve on the committee. It was Sessions’ show.

He used it to take swipes at Cobb County (for allegedly overdrawing water from Lake Allatoona), Gov. Nathan Deal (for allegedly not wanting to strike a water deal with his counterparts in Alabama and Florida) and Atlanta (for building “a billion-dollar football stadium for the Falcons” but not investing big money in water infrastructure).

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