Communities across U.S. offer water bottlers experiences

Disappointment

In Hamburg, Pa., though, Water Superintendent Keith Brobst said that Niagara’s contribution to holding down costs had thus far fallen short of expectations. Niagara has been operating in the Pocono Mountains town since February when it moved into a facility vacated by a local water company. Brobst said that the town’s reservoir could easily accommodate the company’s request to buy 100,000 to 125,000 gallons of water each day. But Brobst said that Niagara, and their predecessor in the facility had experienced warehousing and other issues that had largely prevented them from running at full capacity.

“The first couple of years the revenue was great, I thought we would be able to stabilize rates for a generation,” said Brobst. “But that hasn’t happened. In fact, revenue is down significantly this year.”

Nowhere in the U.S. are water issues as pressing as in Niagara’s home state of California. Rapid development, an arid climate and an historic drought have moved those issues to the foreground in recent years. But it hasn’t stopped Niagara from operating bottling plants in Stockton and the Inland Empire region east of Los Angeles.

Adam Scow, California director of Food and Water Watch, said the watchdog group had fought unsuccessfully to pass legislation that would require water bottlers to disclose just how much water they were taking. Meanwhile, officials in Stockton, Calif. and Ontario, Calif. did not return multiple calls to discuss their dealings with Niagara.

McCloud’s story

But one Northern California community offers a case study — and perhaps a preview — of the struggle between economic development and environmental awareness that sometimes follows in the wake of a bottler’s proposal.

McCloud, Calif., population 1,100, lies in an unincorporated area of Siskiyou County at the base of Mount Shasta. In 2006, Nestlé proposed building what would have been one of the nation’s largest bottling plants drawing water from the springs of Mount Shasta. Some in the tiny town, still reeling from the shutdown of a mill that had employed generations of residents, welcomed the proposal. Others worried about the impact on the town’s other major industry, fly fishing.

The battle was joined at meetings of the McCloud Public Services Board. The board, like the community was split. Doris Dragseth was one of the commissioners who favored the deal and still bitterly resents the eventual outcome of the fight.

“I guess I’m just naïve,” said Dragseth. “I thought, ‘How could anybody possibly fight this?’”

As it turned out, opposition to the plant came not just from locals, but from national environmental groups. Scow at Food and Water Watch said the Nestlé proposal followed a well-established pattern of major bottlers wooing economically distressed rural communities with promises of jobs and other inducements that rarely, he said, meet expectations. Scow said Nestlé’s McCloud proposal fell flat because residents realized that potential negative impacts outweighed the benefits. Truck traffic in and out of the plant, he said, would have stressed local roadways while volume of water drawn from the springs would have endangered the town’s supply.

“It would have caused more damage, put more financial stress on the town than any of the promised benefits,” said Scow. “In the end people felt it was a net negative.”

Dragseth, though, sees Nestlé’s eventual decision to give up on McCloud and build the plant in Sacramento instead as the work of outside groups who bogged the plan in a series of lawsuits while ignoring the economic realties faced by residents.

“They just jumped in and told lies, filed one lawsuit after another until Nestlé just gave up,” recalls Dragseth of the controversy. “We could have had 240 jobs here, now we’ve got nothing but a lot of empty buildings.”