JACKSON - Mississippi has an abundant supply of water today, but that may not be the case a few decades from now, state environmental regulators say.
Mississippi has an abundant supply of underground water sources, said Charles Chisholm, executive director of state Department of Environmental Quality.
"We are spending more time in our agency dealing with the issue of water withdrawal, primarily from the ground, but with some degree water withdrawal from the streams," Charles Chisholm, executive director of the state Department of Environmental Quality, said during a Monday meeting with The Associated Press staff in Jackson.
"We've got to manage this resource that Mississippi is blessed with in a way that people who are here 50 or 100 years from today will have some water use," he said.
Chisholm mentioned the water dispute brewing in other areas of the Southeast. Last month, the governors of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida said they were close to an agreement on how to share water from three rivers flowing through their states.
The states have debated how to meet the water needs of metropolitan Atlanta and farming in southwest Georgia while ensuring enough still flows into the environmentally sensitive, oyster-rich Apalachicola Bay in Florida. The governors expect the agreement to be in place by a July 31 deadline.
Chisholm said DEQ has regulations that protect Mississippi's water from anyone who might want to sponge off it. A big user of the resource is industry, Chisholm said, but DEQ is careful not to issue permits allowing industries to use the "high quality water" that is for human consumption.
"We have to be judicious about which water we allow them to use because all underground water is not the same," Chisholm said. "Some of it is in more volume than others and some of it has characteristics different than others."
The agency is also focusing on air quality in portions of the state, particularly DeSoto County.
Chisholm and Phil Bass of DEQ's division of pollution control, who spoke as part of AP's periodic series of meetings with newsmakers, said DeSoto County may not pass tighter federal ozone standards.
Part of the problem is DeSoto's proximity to Memphis, Tenn., a metropolitan area, the two said.
In addition to working on a compliance plan with DeSoto County, Chisholm said his agency was also cooperating with officials in Tennessee and Arkansas because counties in those states are affected.
Chisholm said air quality is not just an environmental threat.
"There's an economic development component as well, meaning you can't build things in that area that would make that air quality worse," Chisholm said.
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