Gil Strauss, executive director of the Douglasville‑Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority, told a Georgia House subcommittee that Douglas County is expanding its Dog River reservoir to increase drought resilience and accommodate long‑term community needs.
Strauss said the authority’s reservoir expansion will raise the reservoir 35 feet, increasing surface area from about 260 acres to about 600 acres and increasing storage from roughly 1.9 billion gallons to about 6.5 billion gallons. He told legislators the project has been in planning and permitting stages for 13 years, construction began recently, and full implementation could take another five years or more.
On reuse, Strauss described a multi‑decade partnership with Google to supply cooling water without using additional potable reservoir capacity. “We developed a treatment system at one of our wastewater treatment plants…We take highly treated wastewater. We treat it again to Google’s specifications, and we constructed that facility. We operate that facility. It is purpose built for Google’s need. They paid for that construction. They paid for us to operate it. They paid for us to maintain it. There is 0 impact to our rate payer,” Strauss said.
Strauss said utilities evaluate large users, including data centers, within long‑range water system master plans and, when appropriate, require developers to pay for line upsizes or new infrastructure. He said decisions about whether a community wants a given large user are made by elected officials, and water providers supply technical analysis for those deliberations.
Why it matters: Douglasville’s reuse arrangement is a local example of a way to serve large industrial customers while preserving potable supply for residents and other community needs. Strauss also highlighted the long lead time and costs of water supply projects—Douglas’s expansion is a multiyear, multi‑hundred‑million‑dollar undertaking.