Water is arguably the most important resource any region can have, yet few have heard of their local water stewards or managers.
The Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District (The District), the body that protects the Metro Atlanta water resources at large, extending to 15 counties and 97 cities and is staffed by the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), announced a new administrator and manager in late July.
Now over a month in on the new role as manager for The District, Victor Engel, Ph.D., is excited to help steer the ship for managing water resources in Atlanta. Engel brings a career featuring multiple stints in federal service, most recently with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
Some of the challenges facing Atlanta today, said Engel, are shared by other municipalities in the Southeast. Others, however, are fairly unique to Atlanta, like the fact that it was not built on a river or large body of water like many other large U.S. cities.
“I think a lot of challenges we’ll see in the future are some of the same ones we’ve seen in the past,” Engel said. “Rising population, changes of land use or expanding urban and suburban areas… we sit at the headwaters of several small river systems, so we don’t have a large river flowing through the Atlanta Metropolitan area like other cities, like the Ohio River, the Mississippi River, the big rivers that you think of… the Chattahoochee is much smaller by comparison. So that’s going to continue to be a challenge.
Justine Schwartz, a senior planner at the Atlanta Regional Commission, agreed that Atlanta’s landlocked status has shaped water policy and understanding in the city and region.
“We don’t have a port in the same way that a lot of those East Coast cities do. But I think there’s been a lot of support and understanding of the importance of our water sources,” Schwartz said, referencing key ones like the Chattahoochee River, along with Lake Allatoona and Lake Lanier — two Army Corps of Engineers manmade reservoirs — and adding that droughts in the past have encouraged people to be more mindful of their water and conservation techniques.
Engel remarked that he was excited to join The District in part due to its demonstrated ability to face these challenges head-on, along with the rest of the Atlanta water community and local governments.
Other challenges that lie ahead include aging infrastructure — a rising issue all across the country with systems built decades ago, but one that must be addressed proactively as historical weather patterns and land use rapidly evolve.
“We’re embarking on an effort to help educate local governments on the extent of the aging infrastructure, and then start to get a handle on a replacement strategy,” Engel said. “Building and resiliency is part of making sure that we are addressing and moving towards resilience to climate extremes. That’s high rainfall but also drought events, and that resilience becomes more and more important as the population continues to grow and we have more people living here and expanding and changing land use.”
Danny Johnson, Managing Director of Natural Resources at the ARC, recounts recent memories of needing to adjust to unexpected conditions. Though the region generally receives plentiful rainfall each year — around 50 inches — it’s not unusual for a particular year to get noticeably less, around 35 to 40 inches.
“If you string a few years together, in a longer extended drought period, that’s where some of our communities could experience some challenges with access to water, much like we did in 2007, 2008 and 2009 when the state of Georgia enacted outdoor water restrictions for a year and a half,” Johnson said.
That outdoor water use ban, implemented in October of 2007, was lifted in June of 2009. Ultimately, the measure proved effective while Georgia’s natural resources rebounded.
Moreover, the state and agencies like the ARC and the District have been steadily working towards proactive measures, too. The Metro Atlanta region has reduced its per capita water use by over 30 percent since the early 2000s, according to the ARC, along with total water withdrawals down 10 percent despite the region adding millions of residents since 2000. The District, which estimated in 2009 that 1.2 billion gallons would be used a day by 2050, optimistically reduced its forecast to about 862-898 billion gallons a day in 2050, building off the success it’s seen in the past with more efficient toilets and utilities finding leaks with new technology.
“Water Wars” saga sequel?
One would be remiss to look at Atlanta’s water resource history without looking at the Tri-State Water Wars, a more than three-decade-long legal dispute between Florida, Georgia and Alabama centered on the allocation of water resources in two shared water basins, the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) basin and the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa (ACT) basin.
In 2021, Georgia won a Supreme Court case against Florida — a big win in the saga. Today, there are still two outstanding cases surrounding the ACF basin, and one surrounding the ACT basin, both of which are on appeal. Despite these ongoing appeals, the conflict appears to be winding down, with the latest huge milestone being a historic out-of-court agreement between Georgia and Alabama in late 2023 regarding the ACF basin, pending certain legal and environmental reviews.
“We’re actively engaged in the ACF Stakeholders group, which is a multi-state stakeholder group that has interest groups in Florida, Alabama and Georgia to try to create a sustainable water resource plan, and we’ve been actively engaged in that since it was originally founded in [2009],” Johnson said. “We want mutually beneficial solutions to these challenges,” he later added.
Looking ahead, Engel said he’s excited to continue to build cross-jurisdictional relationships — something that has made The District so successful in the past. An update of the Regional Water Management Plan, which last came out in December of 2022, is expected to come out in 2028; the process for that is starting up.
