Ridenbaugh Press/Water Rights

An ocean-front county – on the Pacific Ocean – is looking into building a bottled water business.

Coos County in Oregon has been economically hard hit for more than a decade, especially after federal funding on which local government services have relied began to evaporate a few years ago.

On May 18, the county commission met with a local water master to look into feasibility. Afterward, Commissioner Cam Parry told local reporters, “So far it looks pretty good. Our Watermaster was very encouraging as far as being able to utilize the water rights.”

Among other considerations, the county was looking into partnering with a company on the project, or just developing it itself, using water rights the county already has.

A proposal by Nestle Waters Pacific Northwest to bottle some water in the Colombia River Gorge has drawn sharp opposition from Oregon activists.

The firm has said on its web site that “We are currently investigating the feasibility of opening a spring water bottling facility in this region to serve local markets for our products. Currently, most of our bottled spring water is shipped by truck to this area from California or British Columbia. We think it makes good environmental and economic sense to locate a bottling facility closer to our customers.”

It held a hearing on the subject at the town of Cascade Locks on March 11.

That has not diminished the opposition, however. The group Food & Water Watch has obtained so far 4,377 signatures on petitions opposed to the proposal.

The local group delivered this statement at the end of March:

Keep Nestle Out of the Gorge, a coalition of 15 environmental and social justice organizations led by the national consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch, today launched a coordinated campaign to prevent Nestle Waters North America from opening a water bottling facility in Cascade Locks. The groups delivered some 4,000 petition signatures against the facility to Roy Elicker, Director of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW), whose department will play a crucial role in determining whether the deal can move forward.

Nestle has asked ODFW to approve an agreement that would exchange part of ODFW’s water rights at Oxbow Springs with an equivalent amount of well water from the city of Cascade Locks. Nestle would then buy both the city’s well and spring water to bottle under its Pure Life and Arrowhead labels. While the financial details of the deal are not clear, Nestle has paid an average of $.00225 per gallon in other areas where it has brokered similar deals. A gallon of Nestle’s spring water sold in single-serve containers sells for $5.30.

While Nestle has cited the creation of 53 new jobs as a potential outcome of the proposed water bottling facility, some question the quality and safety of those positions. A report released last year by Food & Water Watch found that bottled water workers earn $10,000 less than their counterparts in other manufacturing jobs, and that their injury rate is 50 percent higher.

“Cascade Locks is just Nestle’s latest stop in its trek across America to pump precious water resources from rural communities,” said Julia DeGraw, northwest organizer for Food & Water Watch. “Preying on local economic challenges, Nestle promises new jobs in exchange for access to local water supplies. But few employment opportunities ever materialize from such transactions, and those that do pay very little, and endanger worker safety.”

In this agreement, Nestle would pump an average of 13.88 million gallons of water a month, a proposition that worries many. “Nestle has a poor track record in similar communities across the nation, said Brett VandenHeuvel, executive director of Columbia Riverkeeper. “We’re concerned that Nestle may harm springs in the Gorge.”

Keep Nestle out of the Gorge also opposes the plant because it would increase traffic and pollution to an ecologically sensitive area and could endanger local wildlife. A water bottling facility would introduce up to 210 truck trips a day to rural roads, potentially damaging the Gorge’s scenery and negatively affecting tourism in Cascade Locks.

The largest share of protests over the large-scale use of water supplies for bottled water have appeared in the eastern states. But activity in the western states rapidly is catching up.

The Sacramento Press reported on September 28 that a quietly-generated proposal from Nestle North America to collect water in the Sacramento area for use as bottled drinking water has drawn a strong negative local reaction:

“One of the group’s biggest worries is that Nestle’s use of the water would not be regulated or limited in any way. While city employee and Nestle’s public relations team estimates are tens of millions of gallons apart, the actual amount of water Nestle may bottle each year would be unchecked, according to city staff and activists.”

Nestle has estimated the draw at 82 million gallons of water per year from the American River and its tributaries.

But some of the residents, organized as Save Our Water Sacramento, point out that this is still a large volume in a time of drought, which has been the condition in most of California this year.

The SOWS group remarks on its web site:

Nestlé and the City of Sacramento worked hard to quietly fast-track this project so Nestlé could open its South Sacramento bottling plant by January 2010. The project was only announced in a brief back page article in the Sacramento Bee at the end of July.

While Sacramento residents are required to abide by city-imposed water restrictions, Nestlé would be able to siphon water from our municipal water supply 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. According to one staff member at the Economic Development Department, the only limit on the amount of water Nestlé can pump is the size of their pipes.

Nestlé claims the Sacramento plant would be a “micro-bottling plant,” bottling only 50 million gallons of water per year. However, according to the Department of Utilities, the estimated water usage is 215 thousand – 320 thousand gallons of water per day (78 – 116 millions per year). This would make Nestlé one of the top ten water users in Sacramento at a time when we are in our third consecutive year of a drought.

According to Nestlé, approximately 30 million gallons of bottled water would come from Sacramento’s municipal water system and 20 million would be trucked to the plant from “private springs.” Nestle originally provided no information about the location of the springs, and only did so after pressure from the public elicited a response. They are now claiming that the private springs “may” come from the following spring sources: Lukens Spring, Placer County, CA; Sopiago Spring, El Dorado County, CA; Sugar Pine Spring, Tuolumne County, CA; Arcadia Spring, Napa County, CA. We do not know what sort of environmental impacts Nestle’s pumping will have on these springs and their surrounding ecosystems.

David Dempsey, a writer for the environmental group Conservation Minnesota, contends in a June 28 op-ed for the Minneapolis Tribune that in spite of the new Great Lakes compact, water in bulk could be privatized and sold from the lakes.

“The compact originated from a Canadian firm’s proposal in 1998 to export 50 tankers per year of Lake Superior water to Asia,” he writes. “The Great Lakes states and many citizens worked to prevent the commercialization of the lakes. But they didn’t succeed. While it is now illegal to export 50 tankers per year of Lake Superior water without the permission of the governors of every Great Lakes state, it is perfectly legal to export 50 tankers per year of bottles or other containers holding Lake Superior water with no interstate approval.”

He points out that Texas businessman T. Boone Pickens has made a large-scale market in Texas of water rights, some of which he has sold to local communities.

Dempsey’s prescription:

Correct the oversight in Minnesota’s and other Great Lakes states’ laws that fails to reaffirm water as a public resource that cannot be privately owned, any more than the air can.

Enact a congressional resolution expressing the policy of the U.S. House, Senate and president that the Great Lakes Compact cannot be interpreted or used by any party to claim private water ownership.

Nestle Waters North America, the drinking water bottler that has been running into conflicts over water use around the country, in June said it will seek to capture and sell water from a place that isn’t especially short of it: On the western side of the Columbia River Gorge, near the city of Cascade Locks.

It isn’t the first time Nestle has explored water development in the Northwest, but several attempts in Washington state failed either because of technical or environmental concerns or political opposition.

Reaction in the economically-pressed Cascade Locks area, however, was initially more favorable.

The local community water conflict in several Maine communities, centered around the small city of Wells, took a turn on May 17 when voters at a raucous town hall meeting rejected a proposed ordinance intended to bar corporations from pulling water from aquifers in the town area.

The main corporation involved is Poland Spring, a firm which bottles the water pulled from area wells. It employs several hundred people in Maine.

Three area water districts, including those at Kennebunk and Kennebunkport and the Wells Water District, in 2008 reviewed a water-sale plan but, after public opposition erupted, quashed the idea.

That proposal led to a more controversial flat and permanent ban at Wells proposed by a number of local activities and backed by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund of Pennsylvania. The decision was slated for a community meeting, at which about 650 people met in a crowded room. But another 100 or so were estimated to be outside and unable to get in to vote.

Activists said the meeting was poorly run and that they would continue their challenges.

Could be that the Maine legislature is the most active this year of any of the 50 on the subject of . . . water rights.

Water-related pieces of legislation at Augusta so far total 127, many of them related to disputes between local communities and water bottling companies. A string of bills are aimed at resolving those disputes, but in very different ways.

Said one activist: “What is the future of our water supply going to be like? Who is going to have that say; will it be in local towns? Will it be our state government or will it be these companies taking some water and shipping it out?”

The water that’s used for bottled water has been a bigger topic of dispute in the Great Lakes area, but the debate is moving west: Specifically to the dry area around Salida, Colorado.

Chafee County residents are arguing against a proposal by Nestle Waters North America, which is planning to divert spring water, near the community of Nathrop, which has been feeding the hard-pressed Arkansas River, itself the subject of many disputes. The withdrawal amount could run as high as 65 million gallons per year.

There would be some compensation for that, in the form of an agreement with the city of Aurora, which would release some of its water for the river’s flow.

Nestle Waters is owner of the land and the appurtenant rights. The water would be used in its Arrowhead brand water.

The Colorado Springs Gazette noted on May 1, “At the heart of the debate is whether a community benefits when a company takes water from its springs to sell on grocery store shelves. Some communities have fought such efforts – with mixed results – and the conflict in Salida could presage fights elsewhere in Colorado. Nestle has plans to tap springs in three or four more locations in the state.”

A group of Maine residents protested at the Augusta statehouse to draw attention to legislation aimed at slowing down efforts by bottled-water companies to extract drinking water from the stat.

The legislation, L.D.1028, was aimed at expanding local government authority over water extraction. A hearing on the measure was held on April 29.

The organized opposition came from a group called Save Our Water. Its self-description: “SOH2O (Save Our Water) began as a group of concerned citizens from four communities in Southern Maine opposed to a quietly, and some would say secretively, negotiated deal between Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Wells Water District and Nestle Waters N. A. Corporation that would allow Nestle to extract up to 433,000 gallons of water per day from the Branch Brook Aquifer for as long as 55 years. That was the beginning of part of a larger battle to protect our water as a life essential natural resource that belongs to all living beings on this planet.” [see WCSH6.com, April 29]

Advocates of the Great Lakes Compact – an agreement long sought around that region for purposes of water protection and management – have come close to a congressional approval that would seal the deal.

The agreement would set in place water conservation requirements, strict agreements between the states (and Canadian provinces) on managing the water, and a federal agreement that the massive supply of fresh water in the region would not be exported. The state of Michigan, the last signatory, approved its role in the deal earlier this year.

Debate on the compact started in the U.S. House on Monday and was expected to go on, intermittently, for a week or more. Senate approval was reached this summer, and the Bush Administration is not expected to oppose the bill.

The New York Times reported that “Though passage in the House is foreseen, support there is not unanimous. Some members say the pact is not strong enough to protect the lakes, which together account for 20 percent of the world’s fresh surface water. Among the dissenters is Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, who complained Monday about an exception that would allow bottled water to be shipped outside the basin, among other management issues.”