A local environmentalist is cautiously optimistic about recommendations from the governor’s Water Contingency Task Force released as a final report last week.

“They realized that conservation is the only thing we can do to reduce our water use by 2012,” said Joe Cook, executive director of the Coosa River Basin Initiative and Riverkeeper. “It’s what we’ve been advocating for years — creating water through conservation — so they basically endorsed our platform.”

Gov. Sonny Perdue appointed the 80-member group of business and community leaders to look at ways to address a pending water shortage in the metro Atlanta region. A federal judge gave the counties three years to stop using Lake Lanier as a reservoir.

Task force members from Rome were City Manager John Bennett, appointed because of his position as chairman of the Coosa-North Georgia Water Planning Council; Al Hodge of the Greater Rome Chamber of Commerce; and Lynn Dempsey of Dempsey Auction Co., who serves on the Georgia Chamber’s board of directors.

Conservation and dams

Bennett said task force members didn’t vote on the plan, but they studied options and were polled on potential solutions.

Conservation measures such as adding rain sensors to sprinklers and requiring low-flow plumbing fixtures are “a start,” Bennett said, but won’t replace the entire 250 million gallons a day that would be lost.

If an extension is granted to 2010, the final report also recommends building or expanding reservoirs — including the Richland Creek site in Paulding County that would pull from the Etowah River upstream of Rome.

The report recommends against interbasin transfers, but most of the metro region is outside the Coosa basin, which includes the Etowah and Oostanaula rivers of Rome.

“Any water taken out of the basin, we would like to see a corresponding return of treated wastewater,” Bennett said. “And in order to satisfy downstream users, including Alabama, any reservoir built should also be used to supplement the stream flow under drought conditions.”

Bennett said he supports some conservation mandates for the metro region but hopes the mandates aren’t imposed statewide.

“With new construction, that’s fine,” he said. “But making it mandatory that existing fixtures need to be changed out is an expensive proposition and a lot of places don’t have a water shortage.”

Dempsey said some conservation measures will likely be mandated by law but, as a businessman, he’d like to see more of an incentive-driven program. He also advocated community-based policies, as opposed to a statewide approach.

“But Rome, Georgia has to pay attention to what hurts Atlanta, … and Northeast Georgia and Northwest Alabama,” he said. “We have to be more of a community. Our economy is no longer a Rome, Georgia economy. It’s linked to other communities.”

Underground water

A proposal to pump treated water into underground reservoirs is one that interests Dempsey, who said they are preferable to open reservoirs that require streams to be dammed. Northwest Georgia’s terrain presents “strong possibilities” for underground storage, he said.

“What a way to help our neighbors,” he said. “But if we’re sending our water off somewhere, it needs to come back to us. It’s going to be a challenge for (some donor-counties) but we don’t need to be penalized for having water.”

In addition to resurrecting stalled conservation legislation, the CRBI is circulating a petition asking the Georgia General Assembly to tighten restrictions on interbasin transfers.

“I think we’ve got a good chance this year, but we need as many people to sign it as possible,” Cook said.

The petition is also online at www.nowatergrabs.com, the Georgia Water Coalition Web site.