For those believing the tri-state “water wars” were done with a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision favoring Georgia, along came legal action last week that could add another decade to the already 20-year-old fight.
Florida filed suit against Georgia in the U.S. Supreme Court — the legal setting for interstate suits — claiming Georgia has “overconsumed” water in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River basin, leaving flows to trickle into the Apalachicola Bay, home of Florida’s struggling oyster industry.
Much of the focus of the dispute is on Lake Lanier, metro Atlanta’s main drinking water source.
Florida’s lawsuit doesn’t focus [solely] on Lake Lanier and the Upper Chattahoochee basin.
“Now, they’re taking aim at South Georgia and irrigation uses for farming, not just the Atlanta area,” Morris said. “We really didn’t deal a whole lot with the Flint River in earlier litigation, and it looks like (Florida) is trying to make that a high focus of this case.”
The suit also complains about “low flows in the summertime.”
“It seems like their attitude continues to be that Lake Lanier is a bottomless resource that was built, in this case, to preserve the oyster industry, when we all know it’s neither bottomless nor was it built for that purpose,” Morris said.
The lawsuit doesn’t acknowledge “we have taken huge strides to reduce our per capita consumption,” he added.
“I think they’ve got a tough road to hoe to prove that Georgia is not being a good steward of the water that’s coming down through the ACF,” Morris said.
Shannon Hartsfield, president of the Franklin County (Fla.) Seafood Workers Association, doesn’t quite share that view.
“I was up in Atlanta last year and rode around … and everybody was watering their lawns and going on like there’s plenty of water, and here we are (in the bay) struggling to get any water. It’s not being fair and sharing the pain a little bit.”
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