What happened to the green governor?

Two years ago, Roy Barnes was the darling of environmentalists — not just in Georgia but across the country.
The reason? The brand new governor rammed legislation through the General Assembly that addressed Atlanta’s sprawl problem head on. He created the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority whose mission was to fix the region’s ozone pollution by steering the metro area toward air-friendly transportation.
Suddenly, Georgia had a green governor. He appeared on “smart-growth” panels at governors’ conferences. He was quoted in news magazines on the suddenly hot issue of sprawl. And even national environmental groups would point south when asked how cities and states could deal with over-development, congestion and air pollution.
This legislative session, the green most associated with Barnes’ administration is the enormous amount of money he’s willing to spend on new roads.
(Despite repeated requests, Barnes’ press office failed to comment for this article and didn’t make the governor available.)
Barnes has done more to protect the environment than any of his predecessors save, perhaps, Jimmy Carter. But nowadays Barnes is sounding more like a more typical Georgia governor. That change in tone has pleased developers and business leaders, as much as it’s frustrated environmentalists.
Take the regional water planning legislation he unveiled at a press conference Monday. While a Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce task aforce considered the issue last year, some legislators and business leaders joined environmentalists in calling for a new independent agency — much like GRTA — to come up with a statewide plan. They railed against the idea of putting local governments in charge of water planning. Barnes’ proposal opts to let local governments control metro water planning and the plan’s implementation.
“That’s pretty much like asking the fox to guard the hen house,” says Jennifer Giegerich of the Georgia Public Interest Research Group.
Giegerich’s argument is that local governments were the ones that ignored water-quality problems for decades and therefore aren’t willing or capable of enforcing water-protection laws. Barnes’ proposal offers little prospect that the plan local officials come up with will be adequate and that local governments will follow through with enforcement.
“The problem here is not that the governor is anti-environment, it’s that it’s not a high enough issue on his priority list,” says Hager, director of the Sierra Club’s Sprawl Campaign. “Plus, I’m afraid he’s listening to the wrong people. He goes to the Chamber of Commerce to get their input on what we need to do to protect our water.
“When you look at fundamental issues like water, the key is lack of enforcement by [the state Environmental Protection Division]. We have the laws in place already, but we still fail to get EPD to enforce those laws. That’s something he could do without going to the Legislature, just by telling EPD to do its job.”
Barnes’ tensions with the environmental community are rooted in a shortcoming in his greatest environmental achievement: GRTA. Smart growth experts and anti-sprawl activists had begged state and local officials for years to adopt a metro land-use plan to curb over-development and construction in flood plains and other sensitive areas.
It looked as if someone finally heard them when Barnes created GRTA with the authority to draft a state development plan, which would direct land use. A land-use plan would limit growth in congested areas and make sure areas that feed mass transit systems were developed in the most appropriate manner. Most importantly, a land use plan would prohibit development in areas too fragile to be clearcut or paved over.
But Barnes still hasn’t told GRTA to do that part of its job. The state “is supposed to be thinking about protecting water quality, but you can’t do that if you are paving through watersheds and promoting development in those watersheds,” Hager says. Barnes “turned GRTA into the development council, but he has yet to ask them to start work on a development plan for the state.”
Last year, Barnes gained a few more green points by steering a plan through the 2000 General Assembly that offers economic incentives to fast-growing counties that come up with plans to set aside greenspace. But that program is relatively modest: It doesn’t require counties to set aside lands in flood plains or along rivers, where natural buffers do the most good; and the incentives are rather sparse.
“Barnes has made some progress on the land-use front, he’s kind of tip-toed around it and I would say it hasn’t happened quick enough,” says Southern Environmental Law Center Director Wesley Woolf. “But some progress on land use is a lot for this state, so I don’t want to beat him up for that.”
The first real rift between Barnes and the environmental community developed last year when the state took a hard-line stance in negotiations with Woolf’s group and others over a 25-year, $36 billion regional transportation plan. The plan is the state’s attempt to get metro Atlanta out from under a moratorium against federal road money, which was tied to Atlanta’s ozone pollution. To regain the money, Atlanta Regional Commission planners had to prove to the U.S. Department of Transportation that the proposed roads, HOV lanes, bus services and mass-transit improvements would reduce auto emissions enough to clean up the air.
Woolf says the plan — which eventually was accepted by the U.S. DOT — relies too heavily on roads. His organization was among several that threatened to sue to stop the state from going ahead with the projects.
Barnes agreed to listen to the suggestions of groups like the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund and the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice. After months of negotiation, both sides appeared close to an agreement. But the governor shocked many observers in December when he backed out of the talks. Both sides are now gearing up for lengthy and bitter courtroom battles.
“It was roads first and environment second, no question about that,” says Woolf, who served as lead negotiator for the environmental groups. “I think he feels very strongly about environmental issues. He has done a good job of talking about them, but he hasn’t followed through on the implementations of his promise.”
Woolf is responding by filing a barrage of lawsuits — any one of which could disrupt metro road building for years. He filed one lawsuit Jan. 17 against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over the failed negotiations. As CL went to press Tuesday, Woolf was preparing to file another against the Atlanta Regional Commission, GRTA, the Georgia Department of Transportation and the U.S. DOT.
“The more roads you build the worse air quality gets, the more transit and alternative modes of transportation we get, the better the air quality will get,” Woolf says.
Barnes is taking other steps this session that have environmentalists concerned. Despite earlier plans to do so, he didn’t include bond money in next year’s budget for commuter rail lines from Atlanta to Macon and Athens. But he has put a massive road-building program on the fast track.
If fully funded, the Governor’s Road Improvement Program would put 98 percent of the state within 20 miles of a four lane road within the next seven years. A previously passed state law directs GRIP to add 2,697 miles of four-lane highway across the state, including the controversial Outer Perimeter highway. While Barnes has previously indicated his opposition to the Outer Perimeter, a vast project that would ring metro Atlanta about 20 miles outside I-285, the money he’s placed in the budget could fund parts of it.
“No governor who supports construction of the Outer Perimeter can call himself a smart-growth governor,” Hager says. “That’s nothing but a sprawl highway.”