July 24, 2008

Drops of Concern

The Bredesen administration continues to fail to take seriously the threats coming from neighboring states to Tennessee's water resources. Earlier this year we saw the administration treat the state of Georgia's legislative and legal moves aimed at stealing water from the Tennessee River as a laughing matter, something to be joked about.

Meanwhile, Georgia is moving ahead with a very serious strategy to get access to the Tennessee River in order to divert a large portion of it to water the green lawns of metro Atlanta, and to use Tennessee water to fuel Georgia's economic development.

Now comes news out of Memphis that again highlights again the failure of the Bredesen administration when it comes to protecting the state's water resources. Essentially, the case boils down to this: Mississippi wants memphis to pay Mississippi for Memphis using water that comes from the aquifer that lies directly underneath Memphis.

The Associated Press reports:

The state of Mississippi hopes to persuade a federal appeals court to reinstate its lawsuit alleging the city of Memphis, Tennessee, is stealing Mississippi's water from a major underground aquifer.

[Mississippi] Attorney General Jim Hood has appealed a decision by U.S. District Judge Glen H. Davidson, who threw out the lawsuit in February on grounds that the state of Tennessee should have been included as a defendant. Davidson said if Tennessee were added to the lawsuit, the proper venue would then be the U.S. Supreme Court, which referees such disputes involving states.

When last summer's drought left a number of small towns without sufficient water, gov. Bredesen's first response was to say it wasn't his problem. But as bad press mounted - and as the Tennessee Republican Party highlighted the governor's six-year track record of failure to address the state's crumbing and increasingly insufficient water infrastructure - the Bredesen administration began a series of dog-and-pony-show media events and press releases at which Bredesen with great fanfare doled out federally funded water infrastructure grants to various towns, grants that neither he nor his administration played any significant role in securing.

The Bredesen administration is quite good at creating the impression that Bredesen is doing something about the state's water infrastructure and resources, but the reality is that for six years, and counting, he - and the Democrats who controlled the state Senate for the first four of those years and the state House for all six - have done virtually nothing.