Restrained Optimism

The announcement last week that Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Florida) and Rep. Allen Boyd (D-North Florida) would push legislation for a study of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin was one to applaud with fingers crossed.

The study is a positive in that it will look at the entire river system and how it is or is not functioning properly. The study will also not be conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, hardly a perceived friend of the Apalachicola River and Bay.

However, the study will take well over a year and then will compete for attention among hundreds of other studies Congress commissions with millions in taxpayer dollars every year.

To believe the study a panacea for the river - that this is the best two senior Democrats in a Democratically-controlled Congress could accomplish is telling itself - is to believe that offshore oil drilling will suddenly cure the pain at the pump.

Skepticism also stems the past couple of decades during which the federal government has not been so kind to the Apalachicola River and its basin.

For all the journeys members of Congress have made over the years to see the damage up close, little has changed while Alabama, Georgia and Florida periodically announce progress or setbacks in their now nearly 20-year tussle over water flows.
Little has been done as the U.S. Army Corps, in its cock-eyed attempts to maintain a navigation window, has wreaked havoc on the river itself and its natural direction and flow.

The dredging to satisfy a tiny percentage of stakeholders in the river - but ones with some of the deepest pockets - could easily have done as much harm to the river and bay as current flow levels in this prolonged drought situation.

More than anything, any study worth its salt would come to conclusions folks around here have longed reached - the Corps must get off the river for navigation and the question of flows has to be resolved, not by political rhetoric or pleading or playing nice with those who can't or won't.

The city, the county and the state should move forward with lawsuits to stop the Corps' current plans for short-term flow levels. Any attempt to continue the current levels or further reductions should be met with a lawsuit.

It is clear by now that governments, whether state or the Congress, are incapable of successfully negotiating a solution to water distribution in the ACF basin.

Another study is more navel-gazing while the problem metastasizes and the ailment grows more threatening.

That leaves the courts. The city, county and state are right to press the issue in the only venue where the issues can be objectively adjudicated.

And the Apalachicola River and bay needs a course of treatment now, not another study and another 12-18 months of destruction. Bluntly, there may not be that kind of time to save the patient.