Local & State Headlines

Officials look to preserve water

• Local officials gather to discuss the “lifeblood” of the region: the area’s water supply.

Carlton Fletcher

ALBANY — Dougherty County Commission Chair Jeff Sinyard did not mince words as he addressed the 30-plus representatives from some 11 surrounding counties who came to Albany Wednesday for a Lower Flint-Ochlockonee Water Region summit.

“We’re going to have to be more aggressive in addressing this issue than any other issue affecting South Georgia,” Sinyard said. “The 25 people selected to represent our water basin must have the intestinal fortitude to represent our needs. We’re going to have to bow up on this one; we can’t let someone else tote our water for us.”

Representatives from 11 of the 14 counties that are a part of the Lower Flint-Ochlockonee region came to Albany to hear a briefing on water issues presented by Georgia Water Planning and Policy Center Director Doug Wilson and to discuss strategies for recommending members of a 25- person panel that will be selected soon by Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and House Speaker Glenn Richardson.

That panel will be one of 11 regional water planning councils appointed by officials to discuss and help set water policy in each of the state’s water basins. And the attendees from Baker, Colquitt, Decatur, Dougherty, Lee, Miller, Mitchell, Seminole, Terrell, Thomas and Worth counties echoed Sinyard’s assessment of the importance of the panels.

“The population of our 14- county region (365,082) was roughly 3.8 percent of the state’s population in 2006,” Wilson said. “Yet agriculture irrigation on 658,561 acres in the region accounts for a tremendous amount of water use. We’re one of — if not the — largest water users in the state.

“The people in Florida need more water and the people in North Georgia need more water. There are ways both can get to it, but I guarantee you all of it will go through a courthouse first.”

Dougherty County Commissioner Chuck Lingle, who joined Sinyard and fellow Commissioners Art Searles, Lamar Hudgins, Muarlean Edwards and John Hayes at the summit, got a few “amens” when he expressed a sentiment felt by most in the room at the Government Center.

“I don’t want to see our aquifer’s water distributed through a pipeline to Atlanta,” Lingle said. “That’s the No. 1 issue we face.”

Retiring state Rep. Richard Royal, R-Camilla, said Lingle, and all Southwest Georgians, had reason to be concerned. Noting the difficulty legislators in the region now have pushing legislation vital to the region, he said it would soon get worse.

“Let me just warn you,” Royal, who offered himself for consideration for a council position, said, “when reapportionment is completed in 2011, rural representation is going to be diluted even further. It is imperative that this water council does its work as quickly as possible. The Legislature is going to be dominated even further by metro Atlanta.

“We’re going to have a tough time getting fair legislative measures in the future. We need a council well-versed in water issues, because that is the lifeblood of Southwest Georgia.”

Dan Bolinger, executive director of the Southwest Georgia Rural Development Center, offered administrative help to the council once it is appointed by state officials.

“(Georgia) has a special set of issues that have to be addressed,” Bolinger said. “There is an unknown quality (in irrigation needs) that has been an issue for years, and until someone can predict the weather, it will remain an unknown.

“We don’t want to be the people who write your water plan, but we want to represent you on a managerial level. We feel that we are a logical entity to serve you, but that’s strictly up to the board.”

During a discussion session, an agricultural consultant who works with farmers in Miller, Dougherty and other counties in Georgia and Florida warned that the government would have to take a “common sense approach” to mandating water usage by farmers.

“Just as it’s always been, agriculture depends on rainfall,” Howard Small of Irrigation Services Inc. said. “No farmer wants to pump any more water — with diesel at $4 a gallon and higher — than he has to. But the livelihood of our farmers depend on irrigation.

“There was an old saying that said an inch of rain was a ‘million-dollar rain.’ But with fuel costs today, an inch of rain is worth more than a million dollars to farmers.”

When a number of representatives mentioned dry conditions in their parts of the region, Wilson did offer a bit of comforting news.

“Georgia averages 50 inches of rainfall a year,” he said. “That amounts to 50 trillion gallons of water. Even with the dry conditions we’ve had the last three years, we still use only 1.2 trillion gallons of water a year. There are pockets where there are management issues, but we are not in a position where we’re running out of water.

“There are plenty of people in the state who have a straw in the big bucket of water we have. But as each one sucks a little more out, the bucket’s water level starts dropping. What these water councils are going to have to decide is whose straw do they take out of the bucket when the water gets low.”

Perdue will appoint 13 members of each water basin council, while Cagle and Richardson will select six each. The governor’s appointees will include at least two elected officials each from city and county governments in the basin region, while the lieutenant governor’s and speaker’s appointees must include at least one city- and county- elected official each.

Nominees for the councils will come from a number of sources and are tentatively expected at the state Capitol by July 17.

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