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Clean Water:
Water Meters for Small Water Systems

Our Position:
Bill Number: HB889
Sponsor: Reps. Tom McCall, Bob Hanner
Legislative Session: 2006

HB 889 requires all water systems with 50 or more customers to place individual water meters on each customer’s hookup.  The ostensible purpose for this is to encourage conservation of water by making each user responsible for paying for the volume of water used.  The effect of such conservation, by users in small water systems,  on the state’s entire use of water is below even trivial.  This bill is not about conservation.

Status

Action Needed

Background

HB 889 was introduced on March 29, in 2005, a mere three days before the end of the 2005 Session, at a time when no bill could be expected to pass.  The sponsors of the bill were Rep. Tom McCall, Chair of the House Agriculture Committee and Rep. Bob Hanner, former Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee.  Introduction at the end of the first of a two year session is a tactic for people who have projects they would just as soon weren’t noticed much.  And HB 889 certainly went unnoticed amid the clamor of the end of a session marked by walkouts and other noisy rancor. 

Water Stewards is a slick magazine published in Albany by the GA Rural Water Association, the Flint River Water Resources Council, and the GA Association of Conservation District Supervisors, an internal organization of people affiliated with the GA Soil and Water Conservation Commission.  The magazine started as a promotional tool for the Georgia Water Planning and Policy Centers, which were funded by the legislature, thanks to Rep. Bob Hanner and others, sending the money through the GA Soil and Water Conservation Commission.

In December of 2005, the State Auditor issued a report on the Georgia Water Planning and Policy Centers, and discovered numerous examples of state money being spent on liquor and entertainment and gifts, and a record of minimal academic work, and that of little apparent value to the formulation of GA Water Policy.  The Publisher of Water Stewards, Albany GA resident, Jerry Usry, referred to by the Auditor as “staff for the House Natural Resources Committee,” was also identified as a key operative in the Policy Centers and the relations of the Centers with legislators and other agencies. 

Water Stewards has recently become little more than an advertising outlet for water meters, interspersed with puff piece articles about legislators and other officials who influence water policy, and more importantly, appropriations.  Water Stewards spent a great deal of energy promoting the founder of the Policy Centers, Eminent Scholar Dr. Ron Cummings of GA State University, and his theories advocating “market solutions” to water resource management and planning.  Cummings wanted people with water use permits to be able to buy and sell them, and the water to which they provide access, in the open marketplace.  That plan was firmly rejected by the legislature in 2003, but not before an unfunded bill to put water meters on every farm well was passed, and that was when Water Stewards began looking like a meter catalog.

Agricultural water metering has since been found to be less necessary for measuring water use and for resource planning than the legislature thought in 2003.  UGA and federal agricultural scientists and geologists have determined that they can accurately measure ag water use by using only a few strategically placed meters, plus rainfall records.  So Mr. Usry’s meter-selling friends are looking for some new customers, and small water system customers look likely.

The small water systems of GA, those with 50 customers or more, are mostly found in trailer parks, places in rural areas where entrepreneurs have developed property with small lots, gravel lanes, a well and water lines.   These water systems have been the subject of a series of bills over the last 10 years which have required additional training for the operators of the systems. 

HB 889, if passed, is going to sell a large number of water meters; and advertisements for water meters. Equally hard to understand, for those who aren’t “legislative insiders,” is the fact that the GA Dept. of Community Affairs seems to have an appropriation every year or so in its budget for the GA Rural Water Association.  Last year the Governor suggested terminating these appropriations, but the House Appropriations Committee restored $175K of the funds the Governor wanted to cut.  The final Budget Conference Committee set the funding at a level of $100K.  Rep. Bob Hanner is a member of the Appropriations Committee, another coincidence.  In the current Opaque Budget document, it is hard to even find that money.