L.D. Waters developed Water’s Edge and brought down an Augusta mayor
CORRECTION: A paragraph in previous versions of this article stated Augusta Mayor Ed McIntyre paid L.D. Waters. McIntyre accepted a payment from Waters. The Chronicle regrets the error.
The death Friday of Lamar Denton Waters at age 90 ended the life of one of Augusta’s most colorful businessmen and political figures.
L.D., as he was known, created Augusta’s first residential development on the Savannah River (Water’s Edge) and was the FBI’s key witness for the prosecution in the bribery conviction of Augusta Mayor Edward M. McIntyre.
Born in the small town of Newington, Ga., and reared in Savannah, Waters and his late wife, Kandy Anne, moved to Augusta in the early 1950's.
According to the obituary in The Augusta Chronicle, the couple owned a finance company, pawn shop, bail bonding business, the Martinez-Evans Times newspaper, Dunaway Printing, property development businesses (Waters Edge and The Farms at Greenbrier), gas stations, a dive equipment sales business, a used car dealership, a paving and grading business and, most recently in his last years, Bonaventure Golf in Augusta.
The family will receive friends 5 to 7 p.m. Tuesday at Thomas Poteet & Son Funeral Directors, 214 Davis Road, with only 10 guests allowed in the building at the same time because of virus precautions.
Waters will have a graveside service at 1 p.m. Wednesday at North Newington Baptist Church cemetery with the Rev. Randy Monk officiating.
Most Augusta area residents came to know Waters from his nine years of service on the Augusta Port Authority, during which he began developing his Water’s Edge residential project of town house condominiums on the Augusta Levee between 13th and 15th streets.
Waters went back and forth with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Savannah for two years trying to get permission to build on the north side of the levee just off Reynolds Street but kept running into red tape obstacles.
By late 1980 when he submitted a bid of $140,000 to the Augusta City Council to purchase roughly six acres of city-owned property, Waters was planning to build 75 town houses, a small marina and a restaurant.
The council agreed to accept the bid and also agreed to provide the same amount of street and utility work, figuring to make its money back down the road in city property taxes.
Still, Waters could not get approval from the Savannah district office of the Corps of Engineers.
He later told a Chronicle reporter that he was going to break ground for the property and see whether the Corps would stop him.
And that’s exactly what he did in May 1981 for “53 townhouse condominiums to be known as Water’s Edge.”
Augusta Mayor Lewis A. “Pop” Newman was present along with members of the city council.
“It’s been a long haul to get this far, and I’ve been doing a lot of praying,” Waters told The Chronicle.
Waters resigned from the Port Authority and its chairmanship two years later in September 1983, citing being torn from different political and business factors.
But a couple of months later on Dec. 21, 1983, Waters was back in the news with the shocking accusation that Augusta’s first black mayor, McIntyre, had accepted $9,000 from Waters to influence the city council to allow the businessman to buy and develop another Savannah River property.
McIntyre was arrested that day by FBI agents shortly after noon in the parking lot of the Municipal Building, right after the mayor accepted the envelope of money from Waters, who was working undercover with the FBI.
McIntyre was convicted in federal court in 1984 and sentenced to five years in federal prison. He served one year and two months of actual prison time, with his civil rights being restored in 1988.
His resignation from the city council led Charles A. Devaney, the First Ward councilman and finance committee chairman, to become mayor pro tem until being elected mayor at age 32 in October 1984. He would serve until 1995.
McIntyre, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor three more times, died in 2004 at 72. DeVaney died in 2007 at age 54.