Environmental groups find they still need courts to help protect Georgia's rivers

'It's sad, but it just seems to be the way of the world,' Chattahoochee Riverkeeper founding director says

ALBANY, Georgia — Environmental groups in Georgia are turning to the courts again to protect the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers.

Chattahoochee Riverkeeper announced May 22 it had filed a federal lawsuit against a company building a Columbus, Georgia, apartment complex, claiming runoff from the construction site was choking a stream that flows into the river.

And the Flint Riverkeeper group in April filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Griffin, Georgia, claiming its antiquated sewage-treatment system was polluting the Flint River.

Griffin Mayor Douglas S. Hollberg and City Attorney Drew Whalen declined this week to comment on the lawsuit. The city's communications director did not respond to requests for comment.

Flint Riverkeeper also says it is planning another lawsuit against the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport for allegedly ongoing fuel spills. An airport spokesperson acknowledged a request for comment but did not respond further.

(Upper Flint River watershed map courtesy of American Rivers.)

Flint Riverkeeper's Gordon Rogers said this week that there isn't a timetable for filing the lawsuit to stop the fuel spills at the airport, which is in the headwaters of the Flint River.

"We're lawyered up," Rogers told the ACF Waters Conference in Albany on April 29. "And we're going to file an action against the airport relatively soon — within the next month or two — so we have a seat at the table during all the things that are coming to make the airport better."

Meanwhile, the National Wildlife Federation, the Florida Wildlife Federation and Apalachicola Riverkeeper continue to pursue an appeal in federal court challenging the operation of federal dams and reservoirs on the Chattahoochee River.

Litigation has played a key role in efforts to protect the river system in Alabama, Florida and Georgia.

In 1995, just a year after the group was created, Chattahoochee Riverkeeper filed a lawsuit against Atlanta that led a federal judge to rule the city's sewage-treatment system was polluting the river.

The city would spend more than $2 billion to clean up the river, Sally Bethea, the group's founding director, wrote in her 2023 book "Keeping the Chattahoochee."

In an interview this week, Bethea said the group initially got "huge pushback" from the city. The state and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, she said, also were unresponsive.

"There was no hesitation on the part of our board in moving forward on this," Bethea said. "The mood was — this is too important to clean up the river. Our last resort is a lawsuit, and that's what we're going to do."

But in later years, under Mayor Shirley Franklin and under new pressure from the federal EPA and Georgia's Environmental Protection Division, the city agreed to make extensive improvements. Counties downstream on the Chattahoochee River also spoke out against the pollution.

Chattahoochee Riverkeeper would sue the city again in 2024 over its R.M. Clayton wastewater-treatment plant. The group and the city in February announced a settlement in which the city reaffirmed its commitment to investing millions of dollars in new equipment, upgrades and repairs.

Bethea said politics has become so polarized now, "people won't even sit down and talk." And therefore litigation still is needed to protect the environment.

"We've seen improvements and results that we wouldn't have seen if we had just tried to convince them to do the right thing," Bethea said. "It's sad, but it just seems to be the way of the world."