I’ve been putting this story off for a couple days, but I can’t any longer. Here it is (from the Mount Shasta Herald):

Without comment, the California Supreme Court declined to review a January 2007 Third Appellate Court decision that reinstated the contract between Nestle and the McCloud Community Services District for Nestle to build a water bottling plant on the outskirts of the town.

The Appellate Court decision overturned a 2005 ruling by Siskiyou County Superior Court judge Roger Kosel who found the contract had violated CEQA in that a CEQA review should have been completed prior to an agreement with Nestle.

The Environmental Impact Process is still underway, and there are significant questions about the draft EIR document. It offers little analysis of the downstream impacts of the water withdrawals (make those “unlimited” groundwater withdrawals), and Nestle’s not making any guarantees.

Hurdles remain for Nestle, but the larger contract barriers no long remain.

It’s a sad day.

Nestle waltzed in and absolutely stole that water. A portion of McCloud’s population is happy to sell its soul to Nestle, but nobody ever thought they’d sell it so cheaply.

Nestle’s made literally billions preying on small, rural communities, sucking up natural resources and promising jobs which never quite appear in the quantities suggested.

I recently spoke to a resident who was at the meeting where the McCloud Services district approved the Nestle contract, and a more bizarre sequence of events would be hard to imagine.

My contact heard about the negotiations with Nestle (there had been little public discussion), but little information was available, and draft versions of the contract weren’t available to the public until as little as 48 hours prior to the meeting.

Even with the short notice, a group of concerned citizens showed up at the meeting with a list of concerns and questions (including my contact). Sadly, their questions were met with incomplete answers, no answers, our even outright refusals to answer.

Questions about the fees for the project (the price paid to McCloud doesn’t rise a penny over the 100 year lease), truck traffic and other impacts on the town weren’t answered.

Most in the audience figured the services council would review the questions and call another meeting in 30 days, but instead — in front of a stunned audience — they simply voted to accept the contract without any further public review.

Which set in motion the series of events that lead us to this day.

Of course, nothing’s truly finished, and the Concerned McCloud Citizens group remained defiant:

Diane Lowe of Concerned McCloud Citizens says the group will not give up it opposition to the plant and said the organization is also moving ahead with the EIR process.

“Nothing has changed for McCloud. The issues involved in selling this excessive amount of spring water for Nestlé’s water mining and distribution center continues within the EIR processes,” Lowe said. “The court has determined this a contingent, ‘tentative agreement’ within a definite time frame, for completion of these processes.”

“We now know that on the night of September 29 2003, when the McCloud Community Services District Board of Directors approved the contract with Nestle, that the board did not have available to them the necessary and fundamental information for the approval of an agreement to sell water to Nestle,” Lowe said.

“After three an a half years, an ever growing number of people, including the new MCSD board of directors in McCloud, are beginning to learn even more the magnitude of effects of this unprecedented, gargantuan and encompassing scheme.”

Who Else is Fighting Nestle?

The battle against Nestle continues to roll on in other locations, most notably Maine, Michigan and Florida.

Questions about bottled water continue to arise, and in many cases — including this story from CNN Money — it appears that bottled water is no longer cool.

And this story from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer outlines the energy and environmental costs of bottled water, capping their story with this memorable line:

Gleick offered a simple way to visualize the average energy cost to make the plastic, process and fill the bottle, transport bottled water to market and then deal with the waste:

“It would be like filling up a quarter of every bottle with oil.”

In Maine, Underground Commenter Jessica is waiting for the Maine Supreme Court’s decision surrounding Nestle’s suit against the people of the small towns of Fryeburg and Denmark, including a rather comical YouTube video of Nestle’s attorney arguing that Nestle’s market share is more important than the locals right to say “no.”

The Future.

This isn’t over. Nestle still has plenty of hurdles to overcome, and the nightmare of the EIR remains.

Still, they stand to benefit so much from McCloud’s beyond-sweetheart deal that they’ll bring to bear whatever resources are needed to preserve it.

As always, more news as it happens.

[tags]nestle, mccloud, water, bottled water, corporate sleazebags[/tags]

Posted in Environment, News.