TALLAHASSEE — Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee, said efforts are underway among government and business leaders in North Florida to set up a field trip-style event with Georgia officials to show the impacts of the reduced downstream flow of water into Apalachicola Bay.
“I’d like to see this get out of the courts,” Montford said while addressing the Associated Industries of Florida’s Water Forum 2014 in Orlando on Friday.
“I really believe that we’ve got to make more of an effort to get the people who are making the decisions in Georgia to come down and really see what we have here, and what they too will be losing. If we lose Apalachicola Bay, it won’t just be a loss to Florida it will be a loss to this country.”
Florida, Georgia and Alabama have been locked in litigation for 24 years. Florida contends that water use at the top of the system, in the metro Atlanta area, has reduced the downstream flow of freshwater to the Apalachicola Bay area, damaging Northwest Florida’s critical oyster industry.
Florida and Alabama have argued that too much water is siphoned off upstream for Atlanta’s drinking-water supply.
Last year, Florida filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court in the most-recent attempt to get more freshwater flowing downstream from Georgia in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin. The reduced flow has resulted in an increase in saltwater into the basin, Montford noted.
“If you look at the river itself, for the first time we’ve had sharks and crabs as far as 50 miles up the Apalachicola River,” Montford said. “Those ladies and gentlemen living up and down the river are used to alligators. They can deal with them. They are not used to sharks. And they are not used to crabs on the sand bars.”