On June 28, Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore (R) stood next to the Potomac and formally dedicated a 725-foot-long intake pipe completed last year by the Fairfax County Water Authority (now known as Fairfax Water), which pumps 300 million gallons of river water each day to feed Northern Virginia's sprawling suburbs.
"There were many who labeled this a giant drinking straw, and if it is a drinking straw, it is the most important drinking straw in the history of our commonwealth," said Kilgore.
The Fairfax water utility first filed an application with the Maryland Department of the Environment in 1996 to build the pipe, touching off a seven-year political and legal battle between two states that would end in the country's highest court.
Maryland officials turned down the water authority's request, leading the Fairfax utility to turn to a Maryland Court of Appeals for permission to build the pipe. Although the Maryland court affirmed Virginia's right, Kilgore pursued the case in the U.S. Supreme Court, filing a suit on behalf of Virginia against the state of Maryland, claiming that Virginia does not need to get Maryland to sign off before it undertakes projects that will affect the river. On Dec. 9, the court ruled in Virginia's favor.
MARYLAND AND VIRGINIA have feuded over access to the river since the Colonial era. The 1632 grant that gave the Potomac to Maryland clashed with a 1609 agreement that gave Virginia land that stretched from present-day Maryland all the way out to Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana. A compact in 1785 reached at George Washington's Mount Vernon estate gave both states equal rights to the Potomac River, an agreement that would hold until Reconstruction. In 1877, Virginia agreed to the 1632 grant, which gave total control of the river to Maryland. Then in 1957, Maryland complained that Virginia was not doing its part in protecting the river from illegal oyster fishing. The case went to the Supreme Court, and the two sides agreed to create a joint agency, the Potomac River Fisheries Commission. The latest flare-up over the intake pipe is the second time the two states have faced each other before the Supreme Court, said Stuart Raphael, an attorney with Hunton and Williams, who represented Virginia last year.
He said the Supreme Court relied on the long history of agreements over the river to reach its decision.
"As it turned out, history again played the crucial role in Virginia's victory in the legal case."