Supreme Court To Hear Florida's Water Case Against Georgia

The U.S. Supreme Court is wading into a decades-old water war between Georgia and Florida.

Florida Governor Rick Scott announced in November that the court would consider the state's lawsuit. Florida is contesting what it sees as Georgia's unchecked use of water that flows between the states, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Specifically, the suit "challenges Georgia’s use of water drawn from the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin, including Lake Lanier," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The Supreme Court has jurisdiction over state-to-state disputes.

The fight between the two states goes way back, and Georgia has tried to keep the case out of court. "Georgia had sought to dismiss the suit, filed last October by Florida Governor Rick Scott, that stems from a decades-old fight over Atlanta's daily demand for 360 million gallons of water from the Chattahoochee and Flint river basins," Reuters reported.

Florida contends that "Atlanta’s suburbs are sucking dry the river flow that feeds the oyster beds and fisheries of the northern Gulf Coast," according to the Wall Street Journal.

The feds are also involved in the case.

"In the middle of the fight is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which controls flows and has relied on a 2011 ruling from a federal appeals court that said Georgia has a legal right to water from Lake Lanier, at the top of the river system," Florida News Service reported.

Scott, the Florida governor, welcomed the Supreme Court's decision to hear the case.

“For 20 years, Florida has tried to work with Georgia, and families (on Apalachicola Bay) have continued to see their fisheries suffer from the lack of water,” he said, per the AJC. “The Supreme Court takes up so few cases, and their willingness to hear Florida’s demonstrates the merits of our case before the Court. We are fighting for the future of this region, and we won’t quit until these resources are restored.”

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