|
||||||
|
Staff Writer Poland Spring and the water district that serves Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Wells are close to striking a deal that would allow the company to draw water from one of the district’s underground springs, although a fledgling group of opponents hopes to delay the process. Continue reading Activist Alert: Nestle Again Goes after Spring Water in Wells Traci Kratzer
 The Cabazon Water District has shut off the water supply to the Nestle Waters North America bottling plant in Cabazon. Continue reading District shuts water tap to bottlerDEBRA GRUSZECKI • THE DESERT SUN • JUNE 15, 2010
The Cabazon Water District on Wednesday has threatened to shut off the water supply Wednesday to Nestle Waters North America bottling plant in Cabazon, the general manager for the utility announced late Tuesday. Continue reading Water tapped out at Nestle Waters North America bottling?
It is unfortunate that you have chosen to give former law Professor Orlando Delogu what appears to be the final word on the issue of large water extractions in the town of Wells. He is long on pronouncements and short on insight, with a narrow lens through which he decides what is good for us and what is not. Equally inappropriate is your headline for his April 27 column, which continues to muddy the issue of water extraction (“There’s no way Poland Spring could have depleted water in Wells”). Continue reading Poland Spring issue still boiling Regarding the inaccuracies in the editorial regarding water rate hikes in the Kennebunk-Kennebunkport-Wells Water District (“Water use battles play out in rate hike talk,” April 6): In the words of President Obama, “You can’t make stuff up!” Nestle, the world’s largest food and beverage corporation, owns the Poland Spring brand. There is no longer a Maine company named Poland Spring. And when you deal with multinational corporations like Nestle, international trade agreements take precedence over local ordinances. Any “regulatory ordinance” the town of Wells could have come up with could not have controlled this corporate behemoth. The so-called regulatory ordinance would have allowed large-scale extraction by Nestle of 432,000 gallons per day of our water, for which they would have paid nothing to the town of Wells. Nestle already mines millions of gallons of Maine water each year, and it pays no per-gallon state tax. Further, the Wells taxpayers would have had to foot the bill for damage to our roads caused by Nestle’s trucks hauling our water away. Nestle claimed that there would be “good jobs in Maine,” not that there would be any jobs for Mainers. The only possible jobs would have been a few truck-driving positions. But since our water would have been sent off to a bottling plant in Massachusetts, there would have been no need to hire local Maine drivers. The town of Wells overwhelmingly turned down a devil’s deal with Nestle. Do you really think that giving away millions of gallons of our water to the giant Nestle Corp. would be a proposition that Wells voters would ever want to revisit? Do you think that there is any possible reason the people of Wells would want to give Nestle a second look? I don’t think so. Sacramento Press, Nov. 24, 2009 Save Our Water Sacramento filed an administrative appeal involving the Nestlé water-bottling plant on Monday, Nov. 23. Davis attorney Don Mooney has agreed to take the case if the issue goes to court. Mooney represented McCloud residents in their six-year fight against a Nestlé Waters North America water-bottling plant near Mt. Shasta. The company abandoned plans for the plant in September. Opinion, SeacoastOnline, November 19, 2009 2:00 AM A Nov. 3 vote on water-rights in Wells already is well behind us, but we return to the issue this week with a story on communications between Poland Spring and a handful of town officials. We stumbled across the story, as we report, after Jason Heft of the Ordinance Review Committee forwarded our way via e-mail a letter to the editor. The letter stood out because it was signed by Heft but appeared to have been written by Corey Hascall of Barton & Gingold, the public relations firm out of Portland that has represented Poland Spring in its efforts to find new sources of spring water in southern Maine. It came as an attachment to a blank e-mail sent by Heft. The subject line on the attachment, an e-mail that had been forwarded to Heft by Hascall, said simply, “JASON: letter for your review.” By Steve Bodnar, SeacoastOnline, November 19, 2009 WELLS — Poland Spring’s use of an overt advertising campaign to connect with voters before a widely-debated vote on Election Day wasn’t the only way the company sought support leading into a Nov. 3 referendum, according to records from the Wells Ordinance Review Committee. The company’s Portland-based public relations firm, Barton & Gingold, also corresponded with town committee members to help bolster support for a large-scale water extraction ordinance that would have regulated any contract in town to withdraw water for bottling purposes, according to municipal e-mails obtained in a Freedom of Access Act request. Continue reading Poland Spring PR "helping" public officials in Wells Part II- Nestlé at the City Council: Public Discussion or Backroom Deal? Who is to Blame? Sacramento News & Review Editorial, Nov. 16, 2009 It wasn’t all that surprising when one of Mayor Kevin Johnson’s chief volunteer advisers, Michelle Smira, announced a few weeks back that she’d be leaving her city post to work on behalf of Johnson’s “strong mayor” campaign. Smira, who runs a public-relations business called MMS Strategies, sent her resignation to the mayor to formalize her decision, but she also wrote that she looks forward to working for Johnson again “at a later date.” OK, no big deal. It stands to reason that accomplished staff volunteers might become candidates for job offers from those they served well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. Heads turned three days later when it was revealed that Smira had also taken a job working as a consultant for Nestlé Waters, the giant water-bottling company now building a bottling plant in south Sacramento. So, uh … wait a minute. There’s little doubt that Smira got the Nestlé job at least partially based on her political connections to the mayor. (Interestingly, he’s the one who greenlighted the water plant without a public hearing.) Like lobbyists, public-relations professionals use their connections to help them produce results for whoever they work for. That’s how it works. But it’s weird to have key staffers (even volunteer ones) consider moving in and out of local public service this way, since a symbiotic relationship can develop between the two roles—and what’s good for the city is often not what’s good for an industry. That’s why there are anti-revolving-doors laws at the state and national level. As the Smira case illustrates, it’s past time for Sacramento to take the revolving-door syndrome more seriously and strengthen existing laws that keep this tendency in check. |
|
||||
|
Defending Water For Life in Maine | Coordinator: Emily Posner |
||||||
