Keep water meetings open to the public

November 20, 2009
Ben Emanuel of Athens, the Oconee Projects Coordinator

Always trustily on the lookout for any lack of transparency in government, newspaper editorialists around the state in recent days have picked up on a singularly disconcerting fact about Governor Perdue's water contingency task force, formed early this fall: the fact that its meetings are closed to the media and to the public.

As Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote Nov. 13, "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."

An Athens Banner-Herald editorial Nov. 15 opened this way:  "It's not necessarily illegal, but the fact that meetings of a state water contingency task force are being held behind closed doors is yet another reason to be wary of what the group is doing."

The Banner-Herald quoted Bert Brantley, the governor's spokesman, as saying that the task force's meetings don't have to be open, under state sunshine laws, because the group is not a policy-making body. Indeed, the commonly held assumption about the group is that its decisions will go forward as policy recommendations to other bodies such as the General Assembly, in the upcoming legislative session, or perhaps the state Board of Natural Resources.

Here, however, a bit of background on the task force's genesis, its makeup and the timeline under which it's operating may be instructive. The governor announced the contingency task force on Sept. 29, and on Oct. 7 he announced its members.

The group met once in October; it meets again on Monday, Nov. 23 and then just once more in December before its work is done. Of its more than 80 members, many are from metro Atlanta, most come from backgrounds in government or business, and just four represent conservation organizations -- three of those being groups that focus on land conservation, not water policy.

How can a group with this kind of collective background, charged with such a monumental task and in a very short time frame, be expected to pass out well-reasoned, fair, sustainable policy recommendations to other policy-making bodies? Can the task force operate with true regard for the needs -- economic, environmental and otherwise -- of all who hold a stake in the management of the state's water resources? Or will it simply rubber-stamp whatever ideas are brought before it, perhaps picking and choosing based on other calculations altogether?

To bring things down to earth here, it is worth examining one specific piece of information that has come out of media contact with task force members outside of its meetings. Dan Chapman of the Journal-Constitution reported on Oct. 7 that the group "is expected to investigate tapping rivers and reservoirs outside the Chattahoochee River basin" -- especially, he wrote, east of Atlanta. "First up: Walton County’s proposed Hard Labor Creek regional reservoir."

The Hard Labor Creek reservoir, being developed in a partnership between Walton and Oconee counties in northeast Georgia, would dam Hard Labor Creek but divert water from the nearby Apalachee River, a major Oconee River tributary. Concerned about successfully financing the project, its proponents have met with Gov. Perdue's staff and with Gwinnett County officials about the possibility of selling Hard Labor Creek reservoir water to Gwinnett. The reservoir "could provide 41 million gallons of water daily (mgd) to Walton and Oconee counties," Chapman reported. "Yet they only need 6-8 mgd for the foreseeable future."

It would appear, then, that Walton and Oconee officials want money for water, but they'll want their water back one day in the future. They must be confident that future leaders of their counties will be able to get the water back.

And all that is without considering downstream interests throughout the Oconee-Altamaha river basin, all the way down to Georgia's coast. Such a water transfer from Walton County to Gwinnett would violate the current prohibition on interbasin transfers of water from outside the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District into the district, unless the water were returned to the Apalachee-Oconee basin, which drains only a very small minority of Gwinnett's land area.

If Gov. Perdue's water contingency task force is giving a full vetting to all of these complicated issues in regard to each contingency solution which it examines, then the products of its three meetings this fall may well succeed at solving metro Atlanta's water crisis.

Even if that were the case, however, the myriad stakeholders in its deliberations deserve to know what kinds of discussions are molding its policy recommendations.

And while it is not abundantly clear that the task force is not violating the state's open meetings laws, the sad fact is that it may not really matter: a handpicked, fast-tracked task force seems likely to do its directors' bidding, open meetings or not.  But sunshine never hurts.