Forsyth County Commission Chairman Charles Laughinghouse read a statement at the October 4th Commission meeting in response to criticism from newspaper columnists, and radio talk show callers regarding the county's management of water resources and the county's growth.

Click below to see the statement video.

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Over the past few days following the State going to drought level four, there have been many articles and discussions on the radio about local government being to blame for not seeing that we have a water problem and blaming it on uncontrolled growth. Callers on the Neal Bortz show and an article by Bill Shipp blame local officials for the problem. Nothing could be further from the truth. The growth in this county has nothing to do with the current water shortage.

Our water supply is threatened for one reason only and it would not matter if we have 150,000 residences or 20,000 we would be in the same position today.

Under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer interim operation plan (IOP) and an order by a federal lawsuit, they require 5,000 cubic feet of water per second in the river at the State line. The river is only flowing around 2,500 CFS so they are releasing 2,500 cfs from the federal reservoirs to make up the difference. This 5,000 cfs was a number that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service came up with without any solid scientific study. This was to protect some endangered species in the Gulf, one is the Gulf Sturgeon and the others are some endangered mussels.

Just how much water is 2,500 cfs:

1cfs = 7.4805 gallons that’s, 18,701 per second, 1.12 million gallons per minute, 67.32 million gallons per hour and 1,615,792,207 gallons per day

Lake Lanier is a 38,000 acres lake at full pool that means in one inch of water on Lake Lanier there exist 1.23 billion gallons of water

This year through July the City and Forsyth County have withdrawn 4.32 billion gallons from the lake. That means that our total withdrawal this year dropped the lake approximately 3.5 inches without flow coming into the lake.

In 2.6 days the Corps released as much water as we have taken in seven months.

Now the Corps has dropped the lake to a level that threatens to put our intake at risk and is requiring emergency actions by the City of Cumming. The County has asked the Corps for years for permission to build a deeper intake to prevent this very occurrence, but we have been turned down because of the federal lawsuits.

On a related note, some people believe that watering from a stream, well or lake must be saving the resource by not using potable water. In this case that is not true for every gallon that does not flow downstream a release has to be made from one of the federal reservoirs

This is a State issue and we all must do our part to conserve water. We have enough water to drink and clean with, but we should not be pouring it out on the ground for irrigation at this time.