The Fight to Save the Flint
By Eugene H. Methvin
This story by Georgia native Eugene Methvin originally appeared in Readers Digest in 1974. It was reprinted in The Flint River Guidebook with permission.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1972, Georgia’s Gov. Jimmy Carter had been besieged with pleas to block a proposed federal dam and “save the Flint River.” Finally, in August, the governor took an overnight canoe trip to see for himself the source of the uproar.
The Flint River rises in Atlanta. Leaving the city, it is a greasy, sticky industrial sludge. But after tumbling through the Piedmont Plateau for 30 miles, it becomes a healthy highland stream that cuts through four steep ridges, forming the beautiful Flint River gorges, before spilling out into the coastal plain. In this magnificent fall-line passage of singing waters and hardwood forest, teeming wildlife thrives. Fishermen flock to try the Flint River bass, a prized game fish that spawns nowhere else, while canoeists test themselves on swirling white-water rapids.
“If we are going to destroy all this natural beauty,” Carter said to his fellow camper, Joe Tanner, commissioner of the state’s Department of Natural Resources, “we better make sure that what we get in return is worth the price.”
Back in the state capital, the two men began asking questions of federal planners – and soon found themselves grappling with gravely flawed government machinery for dealing with the twin crises of energy demands and environmental quality. The lessons they learned are vital to all Americans.
Carter and Tanner discovered that for nearly a decade no one had really questioned the dam project. As early as 1955, Rep. John J. Flynt, Jr., had introduced a proposal to plug the Flint gorges right at the mouth, near a place called Sprewell Bluff, flooding almost the entire valley. The Army Corps of Engineers back Flynt’s proposal with impressive statistics. For every dollar invested, the Corps claimed, the dam would return $1.60 – in such benefits as hydroelectric power, lake recreation and downstream flood control – over a 100-year period.
Local economies were promised a boom, and the prospect of “free” federal dollars mobilized a formidable array of vested interests – land promoters, chambers of commerce and rural electric cooperatives. Congress authorized the project in 1963, and in ensuing years routinely voted 7 million on a total cost estimated at over $200 million. Construction was to begin in June 1974.
Carter’s easiest course was to “go along.” But he had begun to sense growing opposition, both in Congress and in the electorate, to the old manner of viewing natural resources through a pork barrel. In 1969, Congress had passed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) which among other things ordered federal agencies to publish “impact statements” on every major section, detailing possible adverse effects on the environment and presenting thorough studies of alternatives. In so doing, Congress launched the nation on a painful educational voyage into the true costs of the resource exploitation that increasingly degrades our environment and our everyday lives. Across America, conservationists marched into courtrooms, stopping dams and other projects until the bureaucrats complied with NEPA. Which is what began to happen in Georgia.
In 1970, the Georgia Natural Areas Council surveyed 53 rivers to see which merited preservation under the New National Scenic Rivers Act. The survey made Georgians realize that they had precious few free stretches of river left: in fact, the Flint was the last major river in the state whose fall line remained undammed. Formally assigning the Flint top priority, the Council submitted a report to Carter and urged him to suspend the project.
Almost simultaneously, archeology student and Flint River buff Ron Miles formed the Flint River Preservation Society. Armed with the scenic-rivers report, Miles’ group mobilized the Georgia Conservancy, Audubon Society, League of Conservation Voters and others. As a result, Carter received 6,000 letters, and visits from more than 50 citizens’ delegations. “And that,” says the governor with a grin, “is enough to get any politician’s attention.”
Under federal law, the governor of any state is entitled to see all Corps of Engineers reports to Congress on projects within his state. But when Carter sought data in support of the Flint River project, he encountered only obfuscation and delay. He found the Corps’ NEPA-ordered impact statement “little more than promotional literature supporting dam construction.” Threatened with court action, the Corps announced plans for a revised statement.
Awaiting the report, the governor directed Commissioner Tanner to assemble geologist, archeologists, hydrologist, historians and plant and wildlife experts for an independent analysis. University students and professors pitched in with their own studies. In Washington, Georgia Sen. Herman Talmadge (D. GA) through a supporter of the project, asked the General Accounting Office (GAO) for its opinion on the Corps proposal.
When he received all the reports, Carter got a profound shock. Despite the clear command of NEPA for a detailed presentation of alternatives, the Corps’ new impact statement brushed aside other possibilities with a bare mention. Additionally, the reports from Tanner and the GAO made clear that the Corps had omitted colossal costs and had wildly inflated benefits in an effort to “sell” the dam. Examples:
The project’s 211-foot dam would totally submerge the Flint valley for 28 of its most scenic miles. Yet the Corps measured the devastation of 24,500 acres of magnificent hardwood forest at a mere $248,000 annually, the net value of the raw timber produced. And it ignored an annual loss to the state of $12 million in jobs and other income.
The dam would bottle up a self-purifying river, possibly forcing upstream cities to spend additional millions removing nutrients from sewage-treatment effluents. Yet nowhere in the Corps’ impact statement was the danger acknowledged.
The Corps claimed a $127,000 annual “wildlife” benefit–the income expected from reservoir fishing permits. Yet the project would destroy one of Georgia’s finest wildlife habitats, threatening extinction of the river’s bass, and devastating deer, wild turkey and osprey populations.
Fourteen Mercer University student volunteers conducted a massive study of usage on Georgia’s recreational lakes to test a Corps estimate of nearly $4 million in annual recreation benefits from the proposed reservoir. They found that the new lake would compete with nine other large water impoundments, all within 50 miles, all operating at far below capacity. (One such federally financed lake, just 26 miles from Sprewell Bluff, was already going bankrupt from underuse.) Moreover, the state’s own 1972 survey showed “a gigantic present deficit” of stream recreational opportunities, which it predicted would double within a decade.
Once the facts were clear, Carter called for a Congressional probe of the Corps’ cost/benefit hocus-pocus and urged Congress to revoke the project’s appropriation. “The Corps grossly misrepresented both benefits and costs,” he declared. “It did not look for least-cost solutions, just dam solutions.”
Embarrassed Corps officials suspended construction. But at the request of Congressman Flynt, Corps headquarters in Washington drafted a resolution for introduction in the Georgia legislature disavowing Carter’s stand and calling on the Corps and Congress to build the Flint dam anyway. Last February, the Georgia house passed the resolution, but to the shock of traditional pork-barrelers, it was it was beaten twice in the senate by narrow margins of two and six votes.
Still the Corps wasn’t ready to give up. It sent to the White House additional data to persuade President Nixon to include the Flint dam in his crash program to make the nation self-sufficient in energy by 1980. Unhappily for the Corps, Governor Carter’s Naval career in nuclear engineering and submarine power plants equipped him to suggest and energy alternative to the Flint dam.
From the Atomic Energy Commission, Carter learned that for less than one third the Flint Project’s cost, Uncle Sam could buy nuclear generating capacity that would supply seven times as much electricity. (Obscured in the Corps’ design data was the astonishing reality that the Flint’s meager flow could turn generators only the equivalent of 42 days a year.) Thus, for $140 million less, taxpayers could have sevenfold the electricity–and save a unique wilderness resource in the bargain.
So the Flint–thanks to NEPA, a wide mobilization of concerned citizens, and a courageous and technically trained governor–was saved from the bulldozers. Or was it? This August, Georgia will hold primary elections to select candidates for governor. (Jimmy Carter is not eligible to run again.) Former governor Lester Maddox, a leading candidate, has pledged to push the dam if elected. Ultimately, only the President and Congress, braced by the voters, can halt the trilateral juggernaut of a runaway civilian technocracy backed by Capitol Hill pork-barrel committees and hungry vested interests.
Urgent Lessons. “It is important for the entire nation to understand where this kind of planning technocracy goes wrong and what we must do about it,” says Carter. To avoid Flint River struggles in the future, these steps are crucial:
Remove bureaucratic blinders. The Corps of Engineers’ civil-works division is actually a giant civilian bureaucracy staffed by 235 Army officers and 32,000 career civilians. To justify their projects and jobs, these technocrats spin out reams of tables and calculations to mystify, impress, bedazzle and baffle outsiders, including Congressional appropriators who vote their $1.5-billion annual budget. Federal agencies like the Corps must be forced to recruit professionals with broader values and perspectives.
Open planning process. A recent GAO survey found that most federal agencies have fallen far short of NEPA’s aims. Other agencies should follow the example of the Cabinet-level Water Resources Council, which has ordered all federal planners to publish alternative plans in sufficient detail that “the interested public can be fully aware of the basic assumptions, data, reasons and rationales used, and the full range of implications of each alternative.”
Reform Congressional committees. Congress should adopt the recommendations of a select committee chaired by Rep. Richard Bolling (D., Mo.) which proposes the creation of a House energy and environment committee that would develop a broader membership and technical staff. This would equip our legislators to crack the whip over executive-branch technocracies and insist on least-cost solutions.
Demand enforcement. Without citizens to protest, and to move their governor to seek independent evaluations, the Corps would have perpetrated in the Flint gorges a horrendous desecration of a valuable natural resource at tremendous cost to taxpayers. NEPA’s requirement that agencies publish impact statements will not work effectively without public vigilance and insistence. The Mercer University students summed it up: “The politicians will change only when attitudes in our society change.”
Finally, we must realize that our swamps and forests, our rivers and mountains, perform vital life-support functions that have monetary values we are only beginning to learn to calculate. We can never create water-cleansing mechanisms like the Flint River. We can only save those we have.