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International
Herald Tribune
March
21, 2008
by Erica
Gies
SAN FRANCISCO: McCloud, a former lumber company town in
the far north of California, has the charm of a small village
and a breathtaking setting among pine and fir trees on the
southern flank of Mount Shasta.
In 2003, the town government
signed a contract to sell its spring water to Nestlé Waters North America, a subsidiary
of Nestlé, the world's largest food and beverage company.
Nearly one-third of bottled water sold in the United States
in 2006 came from the 23 Nestlé plants in the United
States, earning the company $3.57 billion.
The Nestlé deal has divided
McCloud, a close-knit town of about 1,350 people. While
some support it because they welcome economic development,
others object to the lack of public input on the contract
and the possible environmental effects. Almost five years
after the contract was signed, construction of the plant
has yet to begin.
"It's the issue in town," said Curtis Knight,
the Mount Shasta area manager of California Trout, a wild
fishery conservation group. "You know, who are you and
are you pro-Nestlé or are you anti-Nestlé?
It's really been a wedge through town, and I think it's unfortunate."
Nestlé's water bottling operations earned it €6.3
billion, or $9.9 billion, worldwide in 2007, but they often
stir controversy. Lawsuits against the company have been
filed - and some won - in Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, California,
Maine, and in Brazil. The debate in McCloud over the bottling
contract is about method and content.
In December, Representative Dennis
Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, was the chairman for the first
of several House subcommittee hearings on water. He said
bottling companies usually put plants "in rural areas,
where people don't necessarily have access to big law firms
or the attention of the federal government to protect their
economic interests."
"There are always questions raised in terms of how
these contracts are gained and whether people have informed
consent," he said.
McCloud is unincorporated, so the McCloud Community Services
District board serves as the town government, with five elected
board members. Many residents said the board signed the deal
with little public input.
Dave Palais, the Northern California
natural resource manager for Nestlé, and Al Schoenstein,
a district board member elected in 2006, said standard
consultation procedures were followed for the contract,
with notices announcing public meetings posted in the newspaper.
They said residents largely stayed away from the discussions
until a meeting Sept. 29, 2003. That session was well attended,
and residents asked Palais and the board many questions.
But many questions were not answered, some residents said,
and at the end of the night the board approved the deal.
"I was really upset," said Tim Dickinson, the
board president, who was also elected in 2006 and not on
the board when the contract was signed. "It was announced
as being an 'info' session, and after it was done, the board
signed the contract."
Kucinich said this story was
common. At his hearings, people "testified
that local and state authorities often short-circuited their
complaints and curtailed their input in the face of these
perceived economic benefits that a water bottling plant promised
to bring to a region," he said.
The McCloud contract's terms trouble many people. Debra
Anderson is a third-generation McCloud resident who helped
create McCloud Watershed Council in 2004 to educate her neighbors
about the issues. The group took a survey two years ago and
found that 77 percent of the citizens were opposed to the
contract as written.
Knight, of the fishery group,
said opponents' top concerns were the price that Nestlé would
pay for the water, once the plant started operating, and
the length of the contract, which runs for 100 years.
McCloud would receive about $305,000
the first year, based on residential water tariffs, which
equals $191 per acre foot, or 15.5 cents per cubic meter.
By comparison, Nestlé is
paying $2,183 per acre foot to Pure Mountain Spring in Maine
for its water, according to an economic study conducted by
ECONorthwest, a consulting firm.
People also objected to an exclusivity clause, the quantity
of water to be sold and the lack of information on how it
would affect the environment.
A local group, Concerned McCloud
Citizens, filed a lawsuit against Nestlé, saying that an environmental review,
allowing discussion of alternatives or mitigation measures,
should have been done before the town agreed to a contract.
A district court sided with the group, but Nestlé appealed
the decision and won because it said McCloud still had the
right to negotiate contingency issues.
While the case was going through
the courts, Nestlé began
an environmental impact report under the California Environmental
Quality Act. The first draft, published in 2006, received
4,000 public comments.
Protect Our Waters, a group of
residents and trout fishery and habitat conservationists,
hired experts to study the report. Betsy Phair of Concerned
McCloud Citizens said the report did not address downstream
communities, aquifer effects, climate change, fish, diesel
fumes from increased trucking, or hazardous waste on the
former mill site where Nestlé plans
to build its plant.
Protect Our Waters has been trying
to get Nestle to agree to "adaptive management," in which the ecosystem
is measured and natural variability is understood, and then
a long-term monitoring system would track the plant's effect
on the environment. If Nestlé was found to be hurting
the environment, it would have to change its operations.
In February, under pressure from
conservationists, Nestlé agreed
to cap its water extraction at 1,600 acre feet a year, or
just under 2 million cubic meters. It also agreed that it
would not drill groundwater wells and would conduct more
environmental studies in a second environmental impact report.
But Nestlé is not altering
the contract with the town to reflect these changes. Palais
said the issues were already covered by contingency terms.
Groundwater and surface water
are interconnected in a single hydrological system, said
Kucinich, the congressman. "The
existing regulatory structure barely recognizes this fact," he
said. "For every gallon that's extracted for the bottled
spring water, that's one gallon lost for surrounding streams
and watershed."
Knight, of the fishery group, said he worried that water
removal could effect the fish and ecosystem. He said a local
fish hatchery had been distributing McCloud River redband
trout eggs internationally since the 1870s.
"The McCloud River is sacred water," Knight said. "It's
one of the most treasured and popular trout fishing streams
in the country and has a reputation throughout the world."
Under the contract, Nestlé can build a bottling plant
covering an area of up to 1 million square feet, or 93,000
square meters. "This would totally destroy the integrity
of our small, historic mill town," said Anderson, of
the McCloud Watershed Council.
The contract also allows for 600 daily truck trips, and
the trucks could run 24 hours a day all year. Some people
are concerned about traffic and pollution. Residents who
favor the plant say that plenty of trucks drove through town
during logging's heyday. But other residents say logging
trucks peaked at 150 per day, and they did not run at night,
on weekends, during the winter or on holidays.
Project supporters hope that
jobs at Nestlé will
strengthen the town's economy. But the ECONorthwest report
said that, of the 60 to 240 jobs predicted by Nestlé to
be generated at various stages of operation, most "would
likely be filled by people who do not currently live in McCloud." It
said some jobs probably would be seasonal, and only low-paying
production jobs would be open to local residents. |
