It has taken a generation of city politicians and millions of public dollars, but a trio of small Southside cities are closer than ever to controlling their own water supply.
Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division earlier this year gave the Fulton cities of Fairburn, Palmetto and Union City a permit to draw water from the Chattahoochee River for residents and businesses. This is a massive achievement for three cities whose combined population barely crests 40,000 people.
The permit has caused waves with the city of Atlanta and the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper group — both of which spoke out against the move.
During a meeting this week of the Middle Chattahoochee Regional Water and Sewer Authority, which for years has let the cities advocate for the water supply in one voice, chairwoman Shayla J. Nealy said the cities must still submit more paperwork to the state. But all is going according to plan.
Officials with Atlanta, which in fiscal year 2020 sold $4.8 million worth of water to Fairburn and Union City, argues that federal law requires the cities to buy from Atlanta.
An Atlanta watershed spokesperson said Thursday that the city is expecting a loss in revenue of less than 2% if the cities start their own system. Watershed “will coordinate with our partners for an equitable path forward to a transition of services,” the spokesperson said.
Water policy experts with the Riverkeeper group say that any new water infrastructure that isn’t needed is wasteful and could endanger the future of the river by making it more susceptible to negative impacts of climate change.
Credit: JOHN SPINK / AJC
Credit: JOHN SPINK / AJC
People are also worried about the effect on the seven-year-old so-called “Water Wars” case at U.S. Supreme Court, Florida v. Georgia. The fight is a compilated water rights case that has serious implications on Georgia’s $13.8 billion agriculture industry and Florida’s precious oyster industry.
None of that deterred the EPD, which determined that the Authority’s plan wouldn’t harm the river or wildlife. With EPD’s blessing, the cities are ready to move past naysayers and are excited to embark upon the expensive undertaking.
“Anything in life worth having is worth a fight,” Nealy said.
’Kiss of death’
Through an act of the Georgia General Assembly and a signature from then-Gov. Roy E. Barnes, the South Fulton Municipal Regional Water and Sewer Authority formed on April 14, 2000 with one goal in mind — let these cities carry their own water.
Even then, Palmetto Mayor J. Clark Boddie said Atlanta officials were trying to stop the cities from forging their own path.
“Atlanta managed to have it steered into a committee in the Senate, which is usually the kiss of death, but we managed to get it back out and get it passed on the very last day,” Boddie told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000.
Originally, the Authority wanted to build a $114 million reservoir near Bear Creek. They tried and failed for well over a decade, all while paying a couple million of dollars annually on their since-refinanced $42 million bond debt.
The Authority unsuccessfully tried to show the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that the cities needed their own system.
With the project looking like a pipe dream, the Corps changed everything in 2017. According to the Authority’s project managers, the Corps rewrote their water plan and — for the first time in 20 years — decided there was enough water in the river for the cities to draw directly from the Chattahoochee.
The Authority, which owns 430 acres, in December 2018 filed a joint application to pull water from the Chattahoochee off Ga. 70.
The mayors of the cities got very vocal about the need for their own system in March 2019, when a water main break left more than 100,000 people in southern Fulton with low water pressure or no water at all for more than a day — including two dozen schools and scores of businesses.
When asked at the time what the advantage of their own system would be, Boddie, first elected Palmetto mayor in 1986, said: “You don’t have to deal with the city of Atlanta.”
Although he’s a 40-mile drive away, Sandy Springs city attorney Dan Lee can relate.
Sandy Springs, which has double the population of the three cities combined, has two lawsuits pending against the city of Atlanta regarding water service. City officials claimed Atlanta has over-charged their residents hundreds of millions of dollars since the city formed in 2005.
Lee said Sandy Springs spent $350,000 to have an appraiser analyze the water system in the city. The expert found it would take $90 million to fix everything.
“We’re scared that because the failure to maintain it, we’ll wake up one day and we won’t have any water,” Lee said this week.
Chris Manganiello, water policy director for the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, is also worried about no water being left, which is why he’s against the three cities pulling from the river.
“The more straws we put in the river, the more stress the river will experience,” Manganiello said, adding that the decision could have serious impacts on the Water Wars case.
“I would think that if Florida came out victorious in that case, then the state would have to … certainly be looking at future withdrawals in a very different way,” he said.
But Manganiello said Atlanta is using about half of its capacity to pull from the river. So not only is it possibly harmful to the river, but he argues it’s a waste of taxpayer money for the cities to build their own system.
“It makes more sense to maximize the infrastructure we got,” Manganiello said.
Nealy said she’d rather people keep the money in their own communities instead of giving it to Atlanta.
“It’s good for us because it lets us get those funds in hand … versus giving those funds to an outside entity,” she said.
Nealy, who is also a Union City councilwoman, said a city being in charge of its own water system is also good for economic development.
Union City is already home to many warehouses and logistics hubs, but she said having their own water system makes it easier to woo water-heavy industries, like medical device sanitization.
“We’d love to see entities come because they know they’ll have a water supply that won’t fail them,” she said.
How much will it cost? “We don’t know,” Nealy said.
She said they should have an estimate in six months. After that, it would likely take three to five years before residents can turn a faucet and get water directly from their own cities.
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