Nestle’ Waters August 2009 roundup

Hello Friends,

The County has just released the second Draft Conditions (2 documents) for the Nestle project and they are attached here in pdf format. We have not had much of a chance to look at them. In the interest of time, we thought that it is important to get these out to you as quickly as possible. These Conditions are what will be discussed at the upcoming Commissioner’s meeting this coming Wednesday, August 19 at 9am in the Salida Courthouse.

Please look the Conditions over as best you can. While there is a lot of information, it is important. If you have any pertinent comments, County Staff has said that they are definitely open to hearing from the public. If you want to send an email you can contact Don Reimer (County Development Director) at dreimer@chaffeecounty.org and/or Jenny Davis (County attorney) at jdavis@chaffeecounty.org . To contact them by phone use 719-539-2218.  In the event that the Commissioners say “yes”, it will be these Conditions that spell out in detail many of the obligations and responsibilities that Nestle will be required to fulfill. If you have any questions that you would like to ask of CCFS about these Conditions, we will be glad to try and respond. We believe that the County Staff has been working very hard to provide these Conditions in the event that they are needed. Let’s hope they are not needed.

On another note, please mark your calendars for Thursday evening August 27^th for a CCFS event that you won’t want to miss. We will be sending out the details of this in a very short time, but we wanted to give you a little advance notice now.

We have recently had some contact with Jim Olson. Jim and his law firm have been the legal team that has spent the last 9 years in Mecosta, Michigan battling with Nestle. Below are comments that he has for our community:

If I learned anything representing citizens in Michigan over 9 years, it is better to deny a permit if defensible at the outset, than face the never ending tension between enough information, data, monitoring, exchange of this data, retaining experts, contesting validity of many levels of science, computer modeling, and finding out that the pumping rates are too high for the stream. The cost and effort is huge; in Michigan it cost the citizen group over $ 1 million over 9 years.

Too, contest the water right.  It is one thing to use water to benefit land; it is quite another, and should be contested, to divert, remove water from the watershed and stream to meet a water marketing, private profit goal, something that is not necessary.  To what extent, can water, considered public subject to water use rights, be converted to a private good in a bottle or other container for sale elsewhere, and does this violate common law, statutory law, riparian, appropriation, and public trust principles?  Selling water for convenience must be carefully measured against all other beneficial uses, including in stream flows, before any decision is made.

As a fall back, any permit must at a minimum contain:

1.   Fix the pumping rate at 50% if the requested rate for the first 3 years, while the monitoring, data, exchange, and review issues are worked out, and you are satisfied that the operation is measurable, accurate, and does not cause harm or material diminishment of flows from the stream/groundwater.

2.    Impose a backstop standard that the stream flow will never be reduced by pumping more than 10%, and set the monitoring stations and flow and level measurements in proper locations to accurately determine, especially in the upper most stretches of the stream near the well field.  I have seen in several water withdrawal cases now, that anything over 10% will cause material harm. It’s a safe way to address the issue, minimize most harm, and not be plagued with day to day, year to year, contests over pumping limits, data, etc.

3.    Require all data, flows, levels monitoring, computer models, pumping rates, precipitation amounts, calculations, hydrographs, rating curves to determine, accurately, the relationship of flow to level, so you know under all range of expected natural conditions and flows what a decrease in flow at any point in time will cause to level.

4.    Require payment of the costs of the local government’s retention of expert, professionals, and others to review all data, conduct its own sampling, be present at all monitoring and sampling events; this should be done on a quarterly basis.

For a good recap of the Michigan Nestle battle, go to to The Traverse City Record-Eagle.

And lastly we want to share a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.  YES, YES it is time for the tide to turn and for the public to get off its addiction to bottled water. Let’s all do our part. Very soon you will see CCFS’s offering for a really nifty reusable stainless water bottle that you will want to have.

Wall Street Journal

By Kelly Evans

Bottled water, once thought to be the savior of the beverage industry, now looks to be another relic of the boom.

Nestle SA, the world’s largest food and beverage group, reported on Wednesday a 3% drop in its first-half profit as it missed sales forecasts and trimmed its outlook, according to MarketWatch.

The company’s weakest segment? Its water division, which is responsible for about 10% of the company’s total sales, and includes brands such as Perrier and San Pellegrino. Sales contracted about 3% in the division, the second straight period of decline.

Analysts say the drop is owed partly to growing environmental and health concerns about bottled water — and partly to the global recession, as cash-strapped consumers trade down to tap water.

Companies, too, are changing their behavior: A feature story on the Conde Nast Group in today’s New York Observer reveals the publishing giant has nixed its once-generous beverage offerings at corporate headquarters in New York:

“In December, a few months after Conde Nast ordered publishers and editors to cut 5% from their budgets, the drink supply emptied out. That Fiji water turned into Poland Spring….And then: ‘I just found out today that we are on our last batch of Poland Spring,’ said the source. ‘We won’t have any more after this. We have to start drinking tap water.’”

It’s a trend playing out across the industry, one that PepsiCo Inc. Chief Executive Indra Nooyi addressed in their earnings conference call last month, noting that the company is losing business not among its “core athletes” but among its “casual drinkers”.

“The casual drinker is saying, ‘I want to switch out to tap water because I just don’t have the money now’,” said Ms. Nooyi.

Earlier last month, in a separate earnings call, Pepsi Bottling Group reported a similar shift.

“One of the first things that a shopper can decide to do is consume tap water as opposed to purchasing bottled water,” said Robert King, president of the company’s North American division, “and I think we are seeing just a pretty dramatic change in the growth trajectory of that category.”

“We are assuming that that’s going to continue certainly for the foreseeable future,” he said, though he added the company “still look[s] at our Aquafina business as a viable business.”

Thanks to all for your willingness to stay involved with this crucial subject of WATER and the health and well being of our wonderful community.

Your friends at CCFS