The Atlanta Department of Watershed Management (DWM) is the department of the city government of Atlanta, Georgia, that treats and delivers drinking water, collects and treats wastewater, and manages stormwater. Mayor Shirley Franklin created it in September 2002. The city had operated its water, wastewater and sewer agencies independently before then. The department draws its water from the Chattahoochee River and treats it at the Hemphill and Chattahoochee water treatment plants. It also co-owns, with Fulton County, the Atlanta-Fulton County Water Treatment Plant in north Fulton. Its three water reclamation centers, R. M. Clayton, Utoy Creek and South River, discharge treated wastewater to the Chattahoochee under a single state permit. The city describes the department as a regional public utility serving 1.2 million customers each day.
Most of the department's capital work since 1998 has been governed by two federal consent decrees that settled Clean Water Act suits brought by the EPA, the State of Georgia and the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper. Work under the combined sewer decree was completed in 2008. The sanitary sewer decree runs to July 1, 2027. The program is paid for with water and sewer rates and a one-cent Municipal Option Sales Tax that city voters approved in 2004 and renewed five times through 2024. In national surveys from 2008 to 2019, Atlanta's combined water and sewer charges ranked at or near the highest among large U.S. cities. Greg Eyerly has been commissioner since April 1, 2025.
History Waterworks, 1866 to 1900 Councilman Anthony Murphy began the effort to build a public water system in 1866. The Atlanta Canal and Water Works Company followed, and in 1869 it was charged with bringing water into the city from Peachtree Creek or another stream. A joint committee recommended against a privately owned system. The water commissioners hired the hydraulic engineer Alonzo R. Ketcham to report on a design, and the council agreed to issue $300,000 in bonds, with the commissioners managing the construction contracts. Bids were advertised in early 1874.
The site chosen was Poole's Creek, a headwater of the South River, at what is now Lakewood Park. The works began pumping on September 11, 1875. A 350-foot dam formed the reservoir, and 120 workers laid the main to the city. The department gives the South River plant's capacity as 3 million gallons per day.
The South River supply soon fell short. Mayor William A. Hemphill, who took office in 1891, pressed for a new system drawing on the Chattahoochee. The city authorized $500,000 in waterworks bonds, and construction of the Hemphill Avenue station began in 1892. City Engineer Robert M. Clayton and Water Works Superintendent William G. Richards planned the system. It included settling basins, filters and a pure-water pumping station, connected to the reservoir by a 30-inch main. In 1893 the council's committee on waterworks reported that the water supplied to the city had been pumped from the Chattahoochee since September. The South River site was abandoned. The Hemphill Avenue pumping station was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
Sewers and treatment, 1900 to 1994 Atlanta's sewer system dates to the 19th century and includes both combined sewers and separate sanitary sewers. By 1915 the city had three sewage treatment plants in operation, on Intrenchment Creek, Peachtree Creek and Proctor Creek. The Intrenchment Creek plant was built in 1910 and upgraded in 1936. Atlanta's early plants used Imhoff tanks, and a 1923 Iowa State College bulletin on their operation illustrated the type with a photograph of the tanks at Atlanta. The three reclamation centers still in use were built in the 1930s: R. M. Clayton in 1935, and Utoy Creek and South River in 1936.
The Chattahoochee Water Treatment Plant opened in 1962. In the mid-1980s the city built three combined sewer overflow treatment facilities in east Atlanta: McDaniel Street, Custer Avenue and Intrenchment Creek. Four more served the west side: Greensferry, North Avenue, Tanyard Creek and Clear Creek. In 1986 the city and Fulton County formed a joint venture to build a water treatment plant in north Fulton. The Fulton County Board of Commissioners established the Atlanta-Fulton County Water Resources Commission at a special meeting on May 28, 1986, to plan, permit, build and operate it. The plant opened in November 1990. In 1993 the city adopted a 10-year capital improvement program that, by the department's account, spent more than $1 billion on wastewater and sewer improvements.
Litigation and the consent decrees On June 24, 1994, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution published "Troubled Waters: The Strangling of the Chattahoochee." It reported that storms washed raw sewage into city parks, including Piedmont Park, and that the few fish found in Utoy Creek had lesions or ulcers. On October 10, 1995, the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper Fund, the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper and W. Robert Hancock Jr. sued the city in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. They alleged violations of the city's National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits at its combined sewer overflow facilities. Fulton County moved to intervene on February 2, 1996, and was admitted to the remedial phase on May 16, 1996. On November 17, 1997, the court granted summary judgment to the citizen plaintiffs on liability for the North Avenue, Greensferry and Tanyard Creek facilities. The United States and Georgia filed their own suit in 1998.
The court entered the combined sewer overflow consent decree on September 24, 1998. The EPA reported that it required a $2.5 million civil penalty, which the Justice Department called "the largest Clean Water Act penalty ever assessed against a municipality." It also required a $27.5 million supplemental environmental project to create a greenway corridor and carry out a one-time stream cleanup. The decree set a goal of no more than four overflows a year. According to the EPA Office of Inspector General, the city's 2002 CSO remedial measures plan reported that its facilities had overflowed 50 to 70 times a year.
On July 29, 1999, the federal and state governments filed a second settlement, the First Amended Consent Decree. It covered the treatment plants and the sanitary collection system for violations between 1993 and 1998 and imposed a further $700,000 penalty, bringing the combined total to $3.2 million. It also barred new sewer connections in areas without capacity unless the city added capacity or reduced flow elsewhere.
Privatization, 1999 to 2003 In 1998 Mayor Bill Campbell's administration signed a 20-year, $428 million contract with United Water, a subsidiary of the French conglomerate Suez, to run the city's drinking water system. It was then the largest water privatization contract in the United States. United Water took over in 1999.
A city audit questioned United Water's performance in 2002. In mid-August Franklin announced that "United Water has not lived up to its responsibility" and gave the company 90 days to fix the problems or have its contract terminated. According to Mother Jones, her review committee found that collection rates on water bills had dropped from 98 to 94 percent. The magazine reported that, according to the city, the company had cut its operating costs mainly by reducing the waterworks staff by 25 percent. Public Citizen, which opposed the contract, put the cut at more than half the workforce. Both reported that the company sought an additional $80 million. The city ended the contract on January 24, 2003. The resulting legal dispute ended with the city paying the company $6 million and the company paying the city $1 million, according to Atlanta Business Chronicle reports cited by Rough Draft Atlanta. The city formed a Bureau of Water within the new department to run the system. It was budgeted at about $41.1 million with 346 employees, 43 percent fewer than in 1998.
Creation of the department and Clean Water Atlanta Franklin created the Department of Watershed Management in September 2002 to bring drinking water, wastewater and stormwater under one department. Its first commissioner, Jack Ravan, had been the EPA's top water official. The rebuilding program that followed became known as Clean Water Atlanta, and the department puts its cost at $4 billion.
For the combined sewer area the city weighed three options. Separating 80 percent of the combined sewers would have cost $1.25 billion, and storage and treatment alone $700 million. The plan it adopted combined 27 percent separation with storage and treatment, at $950 million. The city rejected full separation as the most expensive and disruptive option, one that could not meet the decree deadline. Under the plan the city separated the Greensferry and McDaniel combined sewers and decommissioned those facilities. It built the West Area tunnel and expanded the Intrenchment Creek tunnel by adding the Custer Avenue storage facility. The 2003 amendment to the 1999 decree allowed the city to change some of its sewer projects. In 2004 the court terminated the part of the decree covering the treatment plants after the city completed that work.
The combined sewer construction was finished in 2008. The EPA put its cost at $760 million. According to the department, the program separated of combined sewers downtown, evaluated of sewer mains citywide, repaired and rehabilitated of sewers and added of capacity relief. From 2009 through 2017 the city recorded ten combined sewer overflow events, with no more than four in any year.
Sanitary sewer deadline extension On May 31, 2012, the EPA and the Georgia EPD proposed amending the 1999 decree to extend the city's final deadline from July 1, 2014, to July 1, 2027. By then the city had cut sanitary sewer overflows by an estimated 97 percent since 2004 at a cost of $1.5 billion. The city expected to spend another $445 million on the remaining decree work. In granting the extension, the court cited the costs of the remaining work, which would be paid for by a 252 percent increase in water and sewer rates and the one-cent sales tax.
Drought and the tri-state dispute The department reports that total water use in metro Atlanta fell by about 15 percent from 2006 to 2009 while population grew by 6 percent. In July 2009 U.S. District Judge Paul A. Magnuson ruled that water supply was not an authorized purpose of Lake Lanier. The ruling would have cut metro Atlanta off from the lake after a three-year period for the states to negotiate. On June 28, 2011, the Eleventh Circuit reversed, finding water supply to be an authorized purpose of the reservoir. Georgia and the Army Corps of Engineers finalized a $70 million perpetual contract in January 2021 for 254,170 acre-feet of storage in the lake and up to 222 million gallons a day. On April 1, 2021, in Florida v. Georgia, the Supreme Court unanimously dismissed Florida's suit seeking to cap Georgia's water use.
Water supply program