Everything you ever wanted

to know about water, wastewater treatment and watershed management is

about to be delivered to you in three pretty reports. At least that is

what the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District would have

you believe. I suggest, however, when you attend their public meeting

next Wednesday, July 16, you view their "dog and pony show"

with serious skepticism.

I know how this sounds to you,

but please attend. These are very serious issues and they will become

more difficult with each year that passes. If you fail to make your concerns

known, someone in downtown Atlanta will make the decisions for you! And

those decision-makers do not worry very much about the small communities

around Atlanta.

· If you wonder why some

groups are not addressed, (think forestry, agriculture, utilities and

others) you are not alone.

· Are you wondering who

will pay for all of this? You know! But where are the numbers?

· Ever become suspicious

when the numbers come out exactly as predicted? Especially in a case like

this when they don't know the base numbers to begin with. Amazing stuff!

· Final decisions, as

well as enforcement, will come from Georgia Environmental Protection Division.

But they still don't have enough staff to keep up, so how can this really

work?

· Once the plan is approved,

there seems to be no avenue for public input. The cities and counties

will be required to do the work, mostly by hiring consultants ($$s), and

downtown Atlanta will give its blessing, maybe.

· Even though research

available from the Environmental Protection Agency has described health

concerns for water re-use in some circumstances, there is nothing regarding

health concerns in the reports. Anyone want to play golf on a course watered

with sewage?

· Around the edges of

metro Atlanta, construction continues on new Land Application System (LAS)

type sewage treatment systems while the reports are recommending that

LAS be phased out and replaced with centralized systems. Confused? Me,

too.

· If you find yourself

wondering about some of the basic assumptions for the studies, you will

have lots of company.

· If you fail to question

some of the strange logic presented, you are listening too closely to

their fine spin on things.

All over this country, our

once limitless supply of water is fast becoming history. And this is especially

true for clean water, which is disappearing even faster.

The Water District was established

resources and ensure that everyone has an equal chance at the available

resources. From the beginning, many of us worried that a few governments

and businesses would take their share first and little guys would wonder

about the decisions of their upstream neighbors.

The decisions will probably

be made the way they want anyway, but without you, it will be much worse.

Along with a number of your friends and neighbors, I participated in meetings

of a citizen advisory group known as the Flint River Basin Advisory Council.

Beginning shortly after the Board of Directors was established for the

Water Planning District, the Flint River group met numerous times and

reviewed numerous stages of three reports that are now in the Draft Report

which will be presented at the public meeting on Wednesday, July 16.

Our council worked very hard

to make sure our concerns were heard. And thankfully, some very good things

did happen. My concern is that the final documents and decisions still

need improvement and there is still a danger of losing the good things.

Earlier, I suggested a few

areas you need to examine closely. There are others I know I missed. If

you understand budgets, funding methodology and planning for large scale

projects (think $10 to $30 billion here), then your help is especially

vital.

Taken strictly as it was written,

the Georgia General Assembly is looking for answers to a large number

of very difficult questions. There were times during the plan development

process where presentation of citizen ideas appeared to be headed toward

a few answers. However, it is my opinion that the current set of three

draft reports does not provide what the General Assembly requested.

During a recent visit to Santa

Fe, New Mexico, I saw a bumper sticker that suggests where we may be headed.

It says something like this: "When they stop watering the golf course,

I will stop watering my garden!" Even in the Southwest, where water

has been a huge problem for over a hundred years, they still bow to the

special interest uses. The Southeast hasn't reached that point, at least

not yet.

Watch these pages next week

for a discussion of concerns about water quality and related environmental

issues.