It goes somewhat against the grain of Louisiana’s history of minimal government interference, but it might be time for the state to adopt a comprehensive water management policy. And it has the means to do it if it gets to it.

Louisiana’s growing success with attracting data centers has introduced concerns about power and water provision. To date, estimates provided by potential locators have indicated no one of them will cause a shortage of power or produce a spike in costs, nor cause a water shortage or even significantly deplete any particular source.

But success breeds success, and if the data centers keep coming, trouble will follow unless local governments decide to cut them off, forgoing tremendous economic development opportunities. While the Louisiana Public Service Commission can plan out the power side of things, an equivalent planning process on the water side has yet to surface.

Not that it hasn’t been suggested. Over the past nearly 70 years, almost all of a dozen reports from various Louisiana agencies on water management have recommended at least some level of state policy coordination for the 11 primary aquifers and aquifer systems within the state, as well as the ten primary surface-water basins. As of 2020, authority over these resources is spread across nine separate agencies, with at least 735 additional entities exercising local, municipal, regional, or state authority over specific aspects of water resource oversight.

Data indicate that drawdowns from certain supplies have become ongoing, a trend that would accelerate as data centers proliferate. This could prove problematic, as multiple centers located dozens of miles apart could tap into the same source, each operating under a different provider’s jurisdiction — almost always a government entity — or even outside any oversight at all if a center drills or pumps its own supply. The result is little to no coordinated planning for use of a shared resource, creating a real risk of depletion.

The state Legislature began to address this by passing a little-known law this year that attracted zero attention outside of a few special interests and legislators. Act 418 created the CURRENT Authority – the Coordinated Use of Resources for Recreation, Economy, Navigation, and Transportation Authority. The law addresses flood control, risk reduction, navigation, and water resource management and is intended to act as a kind of inland Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.

Coming into existence Aug. 1, it orders other parts of state government and local governments to coordinate with it on water resource policy. It is governed by a board housed within the Department of Transportation and Development, which as yet has no appointees (mostly defaults from agencies or by the governor if he wishes, plus a couple of interest group nominees) to it. Like the CPRA, it is to develop a master plan of six years duration minimum for approval by the Legislature, along with annual plans guided by it, that manages integrated projects, including those offered by the private sector.

There are other things it is to do unrelated to water resource management, and in fact of the major things, perhaps management was intended as the least important, but the CURRENT Authority is there with the power to deal with the question of straining water resources. To fund its activities, it may draw upon the Natural Resources Trust Authority and issue debt. The NRTA, itself established last year, gathers funds from companies engaged in drilling wells as collateral against abandoned properties, plus whatever else budgeters throw in. That collection process only began this fiscal year in the wake of a scandal involving a previous setup.

So, things are off to a slow start — one that perhaps should be hastened in light of the data center boom. In particular, ideological opponents of data centers — because they promise significantly higher consumption of fossil fuels, which is anathema to the cult of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming — are increasingly invoking water needs as part of an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink strategy to curb the expansion of large power users. Moving more quickly under the CURRENT Authority to address both such tactics and more legitimate concerns would pay dividends.