Everyone lives downstream. Those who live in the LaGrange-West Point Lake area know that better than most others. Metro Atlanta has been consuming water up-stream and sending a portion of it downstream as wastewater for a very long time.

In fact, during summer months, as much as a third of the water withdrawn from the Upper Chattahoochee Basin by metro Atlanta never makes it back to the river and downstream to West Point Lake. Instead, it’s either piped out of the Chattahoochee basin or lost by evaporation during cooling at power plants, during outdoor watering and through septic systems.

This may change soon, and not for the better for those downstream, unless our leaders move in another, more sustainable direction.

This past summer, a federal judge declared much of metro Atlanta’s use of Lanier for water supply illegal. In response, Gov. Sonny Perdue formed a water contingency task force to determine how best to address the water “gap” in 2012, when withdrawals from Chattahoochee River and Lake Lanier could revert to 1970s’ levels in the absence of an agreement with the downstream states.

To calculate this gap, the task force - light on downstream representatives - used flawed assumptions in its model, including an unrealistic high-growth scenario for the metro region, completely out of sync with the real-world situation. The resulting future water demand numbers for 2012 and beyond are promoting needless panic at a time when cool heads need to prevail.

Initially, the task force focused on very expensive, highly engineered projects, including the possibility of piping 100 million gallons of water per day from West Point Lake upstream to Atlanta, as well as with other supply options that could mean the elimination of protections that keep our rivers healthy.

On Friday, the task force presented draft recommendations that appear to move away from high-cost and politically charged options such as interbasin transfers of water - piping water into metro Atlanta from other river basins - and the construction of new reservoirs. Instead, the group acknowledged that the reauthorization of Lake Lanier for water supply is the best option, both economically and environmentally, along with conservation.

We must convince our longtime water rivals in Alabama and Florida, and ultimately Congress, that using Lake Lanier for supply is our region’s best option, but that will require an honest commitment to sharing the river system.

Metro Atlanta’s current and future water needs can be secured, while protecting communities downstream in all three states and preserving Georgia’s natural heritage, if we focus all our resources on proven conservation measures and congressional reauthorization of Lake Lanier for water supply.