Fight over Louisiana groundwater extends to Legislature, courts

Some of you may have thought the fight over fresh water was limited to the American southwest or to northern Georgia.

I very rarely agree with The Advocate, but I do think that it's a major blunder to allow massive factories and plants in the region with direct access to the river to tap into the ground water for non-potable industrial uses instead of using river water.

If this issue isn't carefully addressed, water for all users in south Louisiana (especially the Baton Rouge area) will become more expensive.

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Baton Rouge Water Co. is in an all-out, multi-layered fight with a state groundwater panel that agency officials now say is freezing hundreds of thousand of dollars in fee revenues and risks breaking the panel charged with protecting Baton Rouge's drinking water.

The political and legal battle represents a marked shift for both Baton Rouge Water and the Capital Area Ground Water Conservation Commission, which water company officials helped shepherd into creation in the mid-1970s and have periodically led for decades.

At the heart of the dispute is a commission initiative to establish a $1.5 million-per-year metering program to collect hourly pumping data from big water users of the Southern Hills aquifer in a bid to combat chronic salt water intrusion.

The water company and other users are saying the commission is going too far; the commission counters it's responding to a threat to the drinking water supply.

In the courts, Baton Rouge Water has attacked the groundwater panel's basic authority to regulate companies that pump from the aquifer. The company has also challenged the commission's ability to charge the fees that fund its operations.

In the Legislature, Senate Bill 432, which has gotten vocal support from Baton Rouge Water and ExxonMobil, would block the commission meters from being installed if users can provide their own meters with required accuracy levels, as Baton Rouge Water and ExxonMobil say they have.

Commission officials say they want the pumping data for two reasons — to improve the accuracy of the previously self-reported information, which has been used to charge big users pumping fees, and to build a computer model through the Water Institute and LSU.

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