At a recent Republican Governors Association conference, Sonny fired a rhetorical shot at Florida, one of the states battling for rights to the waters of the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers.
In Georgia, Perdue said, "you have a ... pristine undeveloped coastline with marshes there that people love to look out on. And then I come to Florida and I see the developed coastline all the way around from Jacksonville all the way up to Tallahassee, I really wonder how we can be preached at as Georgians over environmentalism and water."
But wait – there’s more:
"Utilizing the endangered species act as a weapon in this battle is somewhat disingenuous,” Perdue said. “We know what this is about; we know it’s about the bay and the quality of the bay and the oysters and that very powerful, very loud political constituency. Let's don't try to make it about a federal law that really it's not all about, about mussels or about sturgeons."
At least we didn’t have to wait too long for the inevitable “mussels and sturgeons” shoe to drop.
OK, time out. Let’s break some of this down.
The governor’s contrast between Georgia’s coast and Florida’s is accurate – as far as it goes. For that matter, he could have taken the same shot at Alabama, the other principal combatant in this water war. Alabama’s beaches are far more beautiful than Georgia’s – whiter sand, clearer, bluer water. But before Hurricane Frederic finished pounding the Gulf beaches in 1979, Alabama was already pimping its coastline to high-density developers eager to bulldoze away modest beachfront houses and pack as many people and bucks into a wall of high-rises as they possibly could.
If Georgia’s barrier islands have remained relatively unspoiled and unexploited, it’s quite possibly in spite of Sonny Perdue, not because of him.
Documents and e-mails collected by Morris News Service last summer, according to the Augusta Chronicle, “show a governor's office at times intimately involved in the debate over legislation to extend the Jekyll Island Authority's lease in hopes of luring private developers,” and “point to ties between the governor's office and lobbyists for developers interested in Jekyll's profit-making potential.”
Drafts of the authority’s plans, and memos of meetings between JIA officials and Perdue, go back as far as 2004, the Chronicle reported. Those records show, among other things, involvement by Perdue’s office in lobbying for federal legislation to remove some of Jekyll from federally protected status for barrier islands where the government does not underwrite flood insurance – a moot issue for undeveloped areas.
So here’s what we have:
We have Georgia’s governor accusing Florida of preaching “environmentalism” o
ver an issue that is at least as much about economy as about ecology.We have the old “people versus mussels and sturgeon” bit, which was a lie from the get-go, is a lie now and will still be a lie the next few hundred times politicians toss it out for the consumption of the simpleminded.
And we have the final, overarching irony: This fight over water with Florida and Alabama has never been about the needs of “Georgia”; it’s about the insatiable consumption of sprawling metro Atlanta – more specifically, the convenience and profits of . . . yep, you got it -- developers.
As inspirational defenses of Mother Earth go, this one pretty much gets drowned out by bulldozers.
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