Drought Reveals Fatal Flaws in Current Political System
Op-Ed
Drought Reveals Fatal Flaws in Current Political System
by Bob Barr
The on-going water crisis resulting from lengthy drought conditions in north Georgia and throughout a large swath of the southeastern United States, contains within its four corners a number of important - indeed, vital - lessons we ignore at our great peril.
On the broadest level, the dwindling water supplies in Lake Lanier, Lake Allatoona, and West Point Lake illustrate vividly the dangerous consequences of placing the very livelihood of a major metropolitan area in the hands of unelected bureaucrats.
For more than half a century, Atlanta's future has been in the hands of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps' Mobile Engineering District office in Mobile, Alabama, headed by an Army Colonel (we don't even rate a one-star general) literally controls the fate of millions of people, thousands of businesses, and hundreds of farmers, in the vast area within the two major river basins of west Georgia. Not a single one of the men and women who serve the Army within the area covered by the Mobile office of the Corps is answerable to the people whose lives they control; none are elected by us; none can be ordered directly by our elected state, local or even national leaders to undertake - or not undertake - actions in our best interests. What guides and dictates what they do with regard to the matters under their control - including releasing precious water from the man-made lakes within their jurisdiction - depends not on what we and our elected officials conclude is in our best interests. Their decisions rest on their interpretations of federal laws and regulations written by - you guessed it - unelected bureaucrats, and on "manuals" passed on from one generation of their leadership to another as the Holy Grail.
Thus, if the Army colonel in charge of the Mobile office, and those lesser officers and civilian employees under his command, interpret provisions in the 1973 Endangered Species Act and its implementing regulations as requiring that twice as much water as is coming into Lake Lanier must be released - regardless of whether drought conditions are then prevailing - that's the end of the decision-making process. Our elected officials - United States Senators and Representatives, county commissioners, state representatives, and even governors - can go begging, hat in hand, requesting the Corps to "reconsider" or "reinterpret" its decision; but the Corps officials are under no obligation whatsoever to do so.
Recently, for example, the entire Georgia congressional delegation - all 13 Members of Congress plus our two senators - requested that the Corps stop releasing huge quantities of water from Lake Lanier and its smaller sister, Lake Allatoona, in order to satisfy the "needs" of certain species of mussels in Florida. After duly considering the request - which was presented not out of the blue but after an extended and obvious period of drought in the region - the Corps issued a statement in which it magnanimously said it would "begin" the process of "updating" the "procedures" for determining how much water needed to be released - a process it apparently had failed to undertake in decades. The Army also indicated it had "started" discussions with another group of unelected bureaucrats - the federal Fish and Wildlife Service - to "determine" if the downstream mussels might be able to get by on less water.
We should perhaps be grateful the Corps has seen fit to begin the process of possibly considering whether to perhaps change the way it does business. After all, in the same way, aren't taxpayers supposed to be grateful when the IRS deigns to returns to them a small portion of their own money in the form of a tax "refund" because it took too much from them in the first place?
Even going to the president of the United States, ultimately the nominal commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, and requesting that he order the Corps to stop or at least curtail irresponsible water releases, is a time-consuming and difficult process, given the competing demands and the fact that the Endangered Species Act has become a new "third rail" of American politics - something that trumps even human life in the view of many on Capitol Hill.
More than a decade ago, another political leader - then-Speaker Newt Gingrich - browbeat the Corps of Engineers and other "stakeholders" in the tri-state watersheds served by the Chattahoochee and the other rivers in our area, into agreeing to a tri-state "compact" to attempt a comprehensive and long-term solution to the water impasse that has plagued us since at least the mid-1980s. I and other members of our delegation in Washington introduced and passed legislation allowing this process to proceed (the Constitution prohibits states from engaging in interstate "compacts" absent legislation allowing it). The process, however, foundered after Newt left the House in late 1998.
Someone might suggest to President Bush that he call Newt and ask him to chair a commission to replicate his leadership in the mid-1990s on this issue. We should also encourage the backbone exhibited by Governor Perdue in at least trying to get the courts to intervene and force the Corps to take into greater account common sense and the value of human life. Legislation should also be encouraged to facilitate the construction of small, regional reservoirs free of the strictures of overarching federal laws, and based on the needs of the citizens in the areas such regional reservoirs would serve.
Ultimately, however, problems such as are now manifesting themselves as a result of the forces of nature combined with the irrationality and unresponsiveness of human bureaucrats, will not be resolved so long as our society allows decisions over our lives to be made by persons immune from the consequences of their actions. Just ask the citizens of New Orleans.
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