RESERVOIR PLANS GET BOOST IN NORTH GEORGIA:  A new state law has reinvigorated plans for a new reservoir on a North Georgia site owned by the city of Atlanta.  Two competitors presented plans recently to the Dawson County Commission for a reservoir on up to 2,200 acres of the 10,130-acre Dawson Forest property the city bought in the early 1970s as a potential site for a second airport.

The project would yield up to 100 million gallons of water per day, enough to serve the rapidly growing Atlanta region either as a major complement or alternative to Lake Lanier, depending on the outcome of the long-running legal tug-of-war over water allocation between Georgia, Alabama and Florida.

“We’re going to have to impound water in North Georgia, not only to supply Atlanta but to supply ourselves,” said Gary Pichon, a Dawson County commissioner and reservoir supporter. “If Atlanta doesn’t have adequate water supply in the future, Georgia starts to look a lot like Mississippi.”

But to become reality, the Dawson Forest Reservoir still must await a final result in the tri-state water war.

Absent a settlement of that dispute, Gov. Nathan Deal and legislative leaders are hesitant to create additional water supplies in a river basin that Georgia shares with either of the other two states. The Dawson Forest Reservoir would be formed by damming a tributary of the Etowah River, which flows from Georgia into Alabama.

The proposed reservoir also must surmount opposition from environmental advocates worried about the effects of piping huge quantities of water out of the Etowah basin and from local residents against flooding the pristine property.

Atlanta industrial developer Jerry Daws, president of Republic Resources Inc., first proposed the reservoir more than two years ago.

At the time, he was working in partnership with the Dawsonville, Ga.-based Etowah Water & Sewer Authority. But since then, the two have parted ways and become competitors.

The General Assembly passed legislation this year allowing municipal water systems to form public-private partnerships to finance and build water improvements. In the spirit of that measure, publicly owned Etowah is now partnering with New Jersey-based American Water Co. on plans for a $650 million reservoir covering 1,200 acres.

“We sought additional resources because this project is too big for us,” Jim King, Etowah’s board chairman, told Dawson County commissioners Sept. 22 during a public hearing at Dawsonville City Hall. “American Water is the largest private provider of water in the United States. They have the resources, the expertise and the funding to do this project without one red cent coming from Dawson County or the state.”

Etowah General Manager Brooke Anderson emphasized the water authority’s local connections in his pitch to the county commission.

“We are part of this community,” he said.

But Daws argued that his Atlanta-based company is the only competitor offering to make Dawson County a “true partner” in the project.

Under Republic Resources’ proposal to invest $800 million in a 2,200-acre reservoir, the county would receive a one-time $7 million “advisory fee” for its assistance with the project and estimated annual payments of $8.3 million to $10.2 million upon full operation of the reservoir.

“They’re the local guys,” Daws said of Etowah. “But they’re not giving [the county] anything. … All the money is going to New Jersey.”

The city of Atlanta, which also would partner with Republic Resources, would get $10 million in advisory fees.

One aspect of the plan the competitors share is that both are offering to preserve 8,000 acres at the Dawson Forest site as perpetual green space in exchange for the land they need for the reservoir.

Neither Dawson County nor the cash-strapped state government has the financial wherewithal to acquire and save Dawson Forest, Anderson said.

“There is no money to allow the state to develop this park in a meaningful way,” he said.

But Will Wingate, vice president of advocacy and land conservation for the Georgia Conservancy, said there’s an alternative to seeking local or state funds to preserve the property or cutting a deal with one of the reservoir developers.

He offered to work with Dawson County to raise the money needed to preserve the property through a SPLOST (Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax) referendum.

He pointed to recent SPLOSTs for open space preservation in Paulding and Decatur counties that passed despite the current anti-tax climate.

“If the public knows there’s a specific piece of property that’s critical to a community, they’re willing to pay for it,” he said.

Besides the potential to lose increasingly rare forestland, Wingate and other environmentalists are concerned about the potential effects of withdrawing up to 100 million gallons a day from the Etowah River on downstream communities.

“This would be the single-largest interbasin transfer in the state,” said Joe Cook, executive director of the Rome, Ga.-based Coosa River Basin Initiative.

Cook also pointed to a legal obstacle to the Dawson Forest Reservoir. When the General Assembly created the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District a decade ago, lawmakers prohibited piping water from outside of the district to customers inside its boundaries.

Dawson County is outside of the metro water district.
The project’s supporters say all of the legal and environmental issues surrounding the project must be fully vetted before the reservoir could win approval.
Since Atlanta owns the property, the city will have a great deal of say in whether the reservoir ever gets built and, if so, who builds and operates it.
Pichon said that, for now, he would be satisfied if the Dawson County Commission passes a resolution he plans to introduce supporting the project.
“I’m just trying to tee this up,” he said. “It would give [Atlanta] and the water companies interested in doing this some notice as to where we are.”
New reservoir
Two proposals are competing to build a reservoir in Dawson County on 10,130 acres owned by the city of Atlanta.
Republic Resources Inc.
Size of reservoir: 2,200 acres
Expected yield: 100 million gallons per day
Cost: $800 million
Etowah Water & Sewer Authority
Size of reservoir: 1,200 acres
Expected yield: 90 million gallons per day
Cost: $650 million
Sources: Republic Resources Inc., Etowah Water & Sewer Authority

Three Cumming families won a $2.5 million judgment against Pulte for property damages they incurred as a result of a the company’s 733-home development upstream. A Forsyth County jury found the builder guilty last week of common law nuisance, trespass and negligence and of repeated violations of Georgia environmental laws.

It is one of the largest storm water pollution judgments in state history, eclipsing a $2.3 million award against D.R. Horton builders in Cobb County six years ago.

By Patrick Fox    The Atlanta Journal-Constitution   September 15, 2011

Find this article at:

http://www.ajc.com/news/forsyth/builder-must-repair-erosion-1181923.html

The decisions are the first signs of progress for the newly formed stakeholders group, which rounded out its second year together in meetings at Lake Lanier Islands earlier this week.  And they are signs that the group doesn’t plan to be taken lightly.

Made up of stakeholders from all ends of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin, the ACF Stakeholders seeks to find a water-sharing solution that all can agree on outside of court.  The group works by consensus, meaning one “no” vote defeats a proposal before the group.  “Everything we do is 100 percent unanimous,” said Wilton Rooks, a member of the group’s executive committee.

Government leaders in the three states have been tied up in litigation for years over rights to water flowing through the basin.

As of this week, consulting firm Atkins and another, Black and Veatch, have been brought on by the ACF Stakeholders to help the group begin developing what it says will be a sustainable water management plan for the basin.

Water in the basin is controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which controls the water’s every move from a series of dams starting at Lake Lanier and ending at Jim Woodruff Dam in Chattahoochee, Fla.

In the coming months, Atkins will begin work on a project that will assess stream flows throughout the basin to determine how the ecological systems in the region operate best. The information will be used in the larger project to explore alternative management plans for the river system that will best serve all the stakeholders, Rooks said.  “The hope for that process is that we will come up with management alternatives that will result in more efficient use of the water that we’ve got in the basin,” Rooks said.  At the moment, Rooks said the initial phases of the project are expected to last between a year and a year and a half, but details have yet to be determined.

So far, the group has committed $50,000 to the initial phases of the project, but is embarking on a campaign to raise $1 million to complete the study and hire an executive director, Rooks said.  Part of its search for solutions will be an effort to involve four universities from Georgia, Florida and Alabama to discover other approaches to manage the basin.  Involved would be the University of Georgia, the University of Florida, Florida State University and Auburn University in Alabama.

As the group begins to explore management of the water system, members are also beginning to seriously consider a plan to raise the full pool level of Lake Lanier. The group formed this week is made up of representatives from each of the three states and will establish project goals, constraints and methods for proceeding with the prospect of raising the lake’s level, Rooks said.

“It’s not just kicking the can down the road, it’s actually putting some plans for a work group to get started on it,” Rooks said.

The group’s next meeting will be held in the Flint River basin in early December.  “The real takeaway from the meeting was that this diverse group of water users in all three states are working together to share a common resource,” Rooks said. “That is our byline and we are pleased that it still informs our decision process.”

Ashley Fielding     afielding@gainesvilletimes.com     September 15, 2011

http://www.gainesvilletimes.com/section/6/article/56057/

Questions that were not asked, but should have been asked:

• What is it going to cost?

• Where is the money coming from?

• What are the long and short term benefits for Dahlonega and Lumpkin County?

The presentation focused on irrelevant, technical data to the exclusion of real world information that would convince anyone that the project should receive public support.  Their discussion of inter-basin transfers required for the project did not convince the public that this would be a good thing or that it would be in compliance with state law.

These folks have been trying with little success for some time to get this project off the ground.  Special offers to those who give up their land for the reservoir would be:

• a right of first refusal of newly created lake lots and

• their names on a plaque.

Whopee!  Don’t you know the landowners will be standing in line for these goodies.

Prior threats to obtain land using eminent domain have made all area landowners suspicious of the project.  Denials of such efforts by current promoters fall on deaf ears when those folks have once been threatened with the use of eminent domain.

As members of the public were leaving the meeting, numerous comments were made relative to snake oil salesmen and P.T. Barnum’s quote,  “There is a sucker born every minute.”

“You mess with my fishing and you’re messing with me,” said Representative Chuck Sims of Ambrose, Georgia, the author of the bill.  Sims, who lives on the Satilla River in Coffee County and who is a member of the Coffee County Fishing Club had been noticing ATVs eroding the banks of his local river for years and decided to do something about it.

“People would ride the river bank from highway bridge to highway bridge–you know what kind of erosion that was causing.” Sims said. “It just made me so mad that they could do that. I love to fish and the river is part of life for me—and really the whole region.”

Sims wasn’t the only person who was angry about the way the Satilla was being treated.  In 2009 the Brantley County commission passed a local ordinance that prohibited the use of ATVs in the Little Satilla and Satilla Rivers of Brantley County.  State law at the time prohibited ATV use on roads or road shoulders statewide, but the penalty for this activity was a fine of only $25.  The Brantley County commission (all five of whom were members of the Satilla Riverkeeper) passed an ordinance that changed the fine structure to $250-$1000 for violating the existing state law, and expanded upon it to protect over 100 river miles in the county.

“This came about for a few different reasons,” says Gordon Rogers, who was the Satilla Riverkeeper at the time the Brantley County Ordinance was passed.

“For one thing, the Brantley County commission was a group of people that cared about the river and they knew that this was a problem that needed a solution. For another, people were using the Satilla and Little Satilla as highways to get to private property they wanted to ride around on. They’d put in the river at a bridge and drive a long way—5 or 6 miles—down the channel to trespass on somebody’s property.  This ordinance made all that illegal.”

It wasn’t long before Brantley County’s new ordinance got statewide attention.  It wasn’t just South Georgia rivers that were being affected by irresponsible ATV use. Trout Streams in North Georgia were being treated poorly by ATV riders as well.

According to Gordon Rogers, “Trout Unlimited really kicked in support for the statewide bill and brought the support of some state Senators from North Georgia like Chip Rogers and Jim Butterworth.”

“Down in South Georgia, people were riding their ATVs on the banks and in the river when it was low enough in the summer. Up in those north Georgia trout streams, people were riding in them all year long and just destroying the trout habitat.  HB 207 passing is a win-win for everybody,” said Representative Sims.

Passage of this measure took four years of diligent work by House and Senate legislators, the Satilla and Flint Riverkeeper organizations, the Georgia Wildlife Federation, Georgia Trout Unlimited, along with many others, including DNR commissioner Mark Williams (who was a Brantley County legislator for much of the process).

Now that HB 207 is a law, enforcement is the key to keeping motorized vehicles out of Georgia’s rivers and streams. If you see someone riding an ATV on a road, the shoulder of a road or in a river or stream, chances are they are breaking the law (although it should be noted that the law does not apply to roads or streams on private property and there are exemptions for certain types of ATV use). This activity can be reported to any state enforcement agency—local police, the DNR, highway patrol, etc.  So keep an eye out and thanks to everyone from the grassroots to the grasstops who made this happen!