City should cap new bottling plants

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson recently told The Bee that, "We need to light a fire under the city's efforts to save water." Most Sacramentans did not interpret this as meaning we should save water for Nestlé to truck away in disposable plastic bottles.

Nestlé wants to start taking a reported 30 million gallons of local municipal water a year in early 2010, despite objections that there was no public input or environmental review for their proposed water-bottling plant.
An emergency moratorium on beverage-bottling plants in Sacramento would allow for processes in accountability to unfold, answering questions that should have been openly considered in the first place.

During the small window of time the proposed water bottling plant has been on the public radar, Johnson has been a vocal proponent. He seems honored that a company as cosmopolitan as Nestlé chose to target Sacramento. However nice that feeling of world-classiness is, you can't water your vegetable garden with it and you sure can't drink it. City residents need local green jobs and healthy watersheds, not corporate spin and sweetheart deals that move water and money out of our community.
Nestlé likes to portray itself as a good neighbor, but consider what happened in Florida when Miami-Dade County started running ads in 2008 promoting the quality of local tap water.

What did Nestlé do? It threatened a lawsuit against Miami-Dade. The lawsuit never went forward, but the company's threat was widely seen as an attempt to scare off public utilities from marketing their own water.
Nestlé has a long track record of operating in secrecy, a lesson hard-learned by the rural Northern California community of McCloud. Citizens there spent the past six years successfully fighting off Nestlé's attempt to build a water plant in McCloud.

According to a 2008 article in Business Week, town leaders approved an agreement with the corporation after a "public meeting" that consisted of a PowerPoint presentation by Nestlé and no time for citizens to ask questions.

In many ways, it is not surprising that this corporation got this far in Sacramento in seemingly only a few months. No matter how late or difficult it seems now, Sacramento residents have an opportunity to prevent the long and painful path that McCloud took simply by taking a deep breath, insisting on a moratorium and doing things right – with environmental review, public input and transparency.

Should we really charge Nestlé less than city residents for water when we are all being asked to curtail our own water usage due to drought and are in an economic recession?

Low industrial rates might make sense when water is merely incidental to the business at hand but not when tap water itself is the unadulterated end product.

Why should we consider letting Nestlé turn on the tap without clearly defined limits? A staff member at the Sacramento Economic Development Department told the local citizens group Save Our Water Sacramento that the only limit on the amount of water Nestlé could pump would be the size of their pipes. Nestlé would have a huge financial incentive, and no obvious enforceable limit, to take as much water at the low industrial rate as they physically could.

Information from the Sacramento Department of Utilities predicts that Nestlé would use 215,000 to 320,000 gallons per day, which would make Nestlé one of the top 10 water users in the city. What would even keep Nestlé at that level?

The crisis of Nestlé's threat to Sacramento's water presents the city government with the immediate opportunity to preserve local water as a precious common resource. They have the opportunity to show that the Sacramento Sustainability Master Plan is more than a bunch of dead words printed on a bunch of dead trees, but rather a living vision for Sacramento's future at the forefront of sustainability and a new green economy.

And there is a chance to prove that the requirements for residents to conserve water are something more than just an inconvenience.

We all need to demand this chance by insisting on the moratorium on new beverage-bottling plants in Sacramento.