By Kevin McCarty, Sacramento City Council, District 6

With California in its third year of drought, the City of Sacramento’s water conservation strategy includes busting people who flood sidewalks.

Since June, we’ve been telling residents they can water landscaping on only three specific days per week and there is to be no watering between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m.

Last year, the City Council decided to ban bottled water at its meetings. We did so in recognition that plastic water bottles are littering the world and the precious water they once contained is often wasted.

That’s why I was surprised to learn that the Nestle Waters North America Co. is moving forward with plans for a water bottling plant in my council district at the Florin/Fruitridge Industrial Park – a plant with the potential to intake more than 81 million gallons of city water yearly. Another 20 million gallons would be trucked in to the plant from springs in El Dorado, Placer, Tuolumne and Napa Counties.

Tomorrow night, Tuesday October 27th, the city council will discuss whether we need an urgency ordinance requiring special permits for water bottling facilities.

These plants pay a flat rate for city water. We also need to discuss whether there should be a tiered water rate for commercial facilities.

Across the nation, attempts to site water bottling plants have been dogged with controversy. In Glenn County, residents in the Orland area are fighting plans for a Crystal Geyser plant. In the Shingletown area of Shasta County, a San Francisco investor has been attempting to acquire water for a bottling plant. He refuses to say who his client is. In Flagstaff, Ariz., the city rejected plans for a Nestle plant last July.

In 2003, Nestle announced plans for a bottling plant in McCloud on the flank of Mount Shasta. McCloud residents once again proved Mark Twain’s adage: “Whiskey is for drinkin’. Water is for fightin’.” The fight raged for six years before Nestle finally gave up.

We owe it not only to Sacramentans -- but to residents of our Central Valley where fields are fallow for lack of water -- to have a thorough public airing of the issues involved in the siting of a water bottling plant here.

Among the issues is the basic question of whether this product necessary? Shouldn’t people who feel the need to carry around a water bottle have one that is refillable?

We also need to explore:

• Whether there are better uses for our water?
• Whether we need ordinances to prevent Nestle from taking even more than the projected 81 million gallons annually if they find a market for it?
• Why the city has not developed an environmental analysis of the plant’s impact on water supplies.
• The extent of the water bottle litter problem in our community.
• A request by a group of citizens called Save our Water Sacramento to impose a moratorium on beverage bottling plants in the city.

Nestle would make extreme profits with Sacramento water at a time when we are trying to preserve it. At current rates, they would pay the city about 65 cents per 100 cubic feet of water, or 750 gallons. That works out to a payment to the city of $186 for the 215,000 gallons of water taken on an average day. By the time that water is bottled and put on a grocer’s shelf, the consumers would pay more than $2.1 million for those 215,000 gallons—a profit margin of roughly 10,000 percent!

And we would still be busting people for flooding sidewalks.