Thousands of Nestle comments being reviewed

The public comment period on the proposed McCloud Nestle bottling plant draft
Environmental Impact Report has ended and the task of sorting out the 4,000 comments
and including them into the final EIR is underway.

“All of the comments will be included in the final EIR,” said Mark Teague, president of
Pacific Municipal Consultants, the company contracted to complete the EIR. “Nothing
will be left out.”

Teague said the final EIR will not be ready for delivery to the Siskiyou County Planning
Commission until the spring 2007.

“We're trying for March, but there is a lot of work to be done,” Teague said. “It's better to
be right than quick.”

Nestle has proposed building a 1,000,000 square foot plant in McCloud on the site of the
old saw mill. The contract to build the plant with the McCloud Services District was
declared void in 2005 by Siskiyou County Superior Court Judge Roger Kosel who ruled
the contract was not in compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act. An
appeal by Nestle is pending.

The plant has generated strong opinions on whether it should be built and whether the
EIR will be sufficient to deal with issues such as the plant's impact on water resources
and habitats in the McCloud River, and traffic congestion from trucks hauling the water
from McCloud.

The plant's proponents say the amount of water the plant will use is small and that
McCloud will economically benefit from the jobs the plant would generate.

Teague said PMC's role with an EIR is not to decide the issues, but to “provide
information on impacts of a proposed project.”

“It's not my job to give an opinion on the project,” Teague said “There's nowhere in the
document recommending approval or disapproval. It's information only.”

Teague said the task of sorting the approximately 4,000 comments took a month to
categorize and electronically scan.

“We picked up two large boxes from the county. There were 4,000 pieces of paper and
none of it was sorted,” Teague said. “Some of the identical comments were emailed,
hand delivered and faxed.”