Three years ago, as he was running for reelection to a second term, Gov. Sonny Perdue used a TV spot that featured ominous videotaped images of Hispanic immigrants slipping across the border to illegally enter the United States. The clear message he was sending to the Republican base was, “Vote for me again and I’ll boot those illegal aliens clear back to Mexico.”
How times change. Perdue welcomed a distinguished Hispanic visitor to
the state on Wednesday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. Unlike three
years ago in his TV commercials, Perdue didn’t threaten to run Salazar
back to the Rio Grande at the point of a cattle prod – he instead had
Salazar flown on a state helicopter so that he could get the big view
of the Lake Lanier watershed (Lanier is the focus of the long-running
water dispute between Georgia, Florida and Alabama).
Perdue could not have been more deferential to the visitor from
Washington. He conducted a newser with Salazar in the governor’s
office behind a lectern that displayed the official seal of the
Department of the Interior. He praised Salazar for being able to work
out a tri-state water agreement during his tenure as Colorado’s
attorney general.
“He may be able to help us work toward a resolution in this area,” Perdue said hopefully.
Why the dramatic change in attitude toward citizens of Latino descent?
Because Perdue was obviously hoping that he might be able to get
Salazar to intervene and help Georgia draw down a little more drinking
water from Lake Lanier.
For much of the state’s political leadership, the fight over Lake
Lanier has always been about insuring a steady flow of water so that
their real estate developer allies can keep building subdivisions and
strip shopping centers – without having to take such sensible
approaches as maybe conserving water instead of continuing to consume
more of it.
One thing Sonny Perdue loves is his developer friends. He appointed
metro Atlanta developer Stan Thomas to the state board of economic
development and Thomas later sold Perdue (for $2 million) a chunk of
land that’s part of a proposed project near Disney World in Orlando.
Perdue also passed when given the opportunity for the state to buy the
Oaky Woods forest land in middle Georgia – thus allowing a group of
local developers to snatch up the property, possibly as the future site
of a “private city” that was the subject of so much furious lobbying in
the 2007 legislative session.
Perdue wants to keep his developer buddies happy, which requires that
the state keep that water flowing to them from Lake Lanier (in sort of
a Deep South remake of the movie “Chinatown”). That’s why you saw
Perdue almost pleading with Salazar to please, please step in and help
Georgia’s developers in their efforts to suck the Lanier reservoir dry.
But Salazar wasn’t playing that game.
“The federal government is not going to come in and impose a solution
on anybody,” Salazar said. “It’s going to take some time . . . the
states will have to get together over the next several years.”
He added: “I do not see us as playing the role of coming in, hammering heads, and getting a deal done.”
In other words, let the litigation between the states work itself out
over the next few years. If the developers run out of water to supply their subdivisions, then that’s just too bad.
“Mala suerte,” as our Latino friends to the south would say.
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