Taken and Delivered - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 131

bureaucrats and special interest groups, including forty representatives from the Forest Ser-
vice, the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, and state development organizations, and resource
managers from three states to discuss how they might collectively shift the Chattooga from
study river to wild and scenic river. Lynn Hill, the Georgia Conservancy's director, and
William Dunlap, assistant to the president of the Georgia Power Company, also attended
the meeting. Dunlap, a longtime executive with the company, frequently paddled the Chat-
tooga's whitewater, and his respect for the conservation community and his relationship
with the company made him a valuable member of the river lobby in the late 1960s. 29 This
November meeting initiated a collaborative and cooperative coalition between federal and
state bureaucrats and public and private interest groups who would continue to speak for
Georgia's environment well into the future. 30
The Georgia Power Company was one of those interests. Long a player in state water and
energy issues, Georgia Power was a major and unique actor in the Chattooga River's story.
Beginning in the 1920s, the company had acquired approximately 37 percent of the prop-
erty (5,690 acres) necessary for the Chattooga's fifty-mile-long and approximately three-
mile-wide protective wild and scenic river corridor; the National Forest Service owned
the majority of the remaining property. 31 The New South company intended to build a
series of hydroelectric dams and replicate the Tallulah-Tugaloo project. But a chronology
of factors—including the public-private power debates over Muscle Shoals during and after
World War I, the 1925 regional drought and subsequent shift to coal-fired generation, a lack
of capital during the Great Depression, and the post-1945 development of civilian atomic
energy technology—led Sun Belt Georgia Power executives to forgo developing five po-
tential hydropower sites along the Chattooga. 32 By the late 1960s, the fast-growing com-
pany became embroiled in a racial discrimination suit and feared competition as other en-
ergy companies such as Duke Power also invested in nuclear energy. To further muddy the
company's public face, Georgia Power encountered customer resistance to a proposed rate
increase to finance future power projects—including Plant Hatch's twin nuclear reactors
on the Altamaha River (construction began in 1968) and Plant Bowen's four coal-burn-
ing units on the Etowah River (1971)—while simultaneously reporting high revenues and
profits. 33 In light of these challenges, and after over half a century of landownership in the
Chattooga watershed, the Georgia Power Company looked for a way out in 1968. Anti-
cipating the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act's passage, a Georgia Power Company spokesman
announced that the company would “be most willing in the matter of land ownership to
cooperate with groups interested in the Chattooga River,” and that the company did not
intend to develop the river's hydropower potential because such projects were “marginal
from the economic view point.” 34 With this decision, a wild river's greatest enemy in the
1960s—the dam builders—backed away from the Chattooga during a national energy re-
gime transition.