The battle over bottling

Poland Spring toasts approval of new plant in Kingfield while lawsuits grind out for Denmark, Fryeburg

By David Carkhuff, assistant editor
November 23, 2006

KINGFIELD —Talk of putting a Poland Spring bottling plant in Fryeburg is now just water under the bridge. Kingfield has given its conditional approval to a new $60 million bottling plant promising 135 jobs to this central Maine community.

The approval was toasted with champagne and sparkling Poland Spring water, according to press reports. Meanwhile, in less than three years, Fryeburg's relationship with Poland Spring has become decidedly chilly. Although officials outwardly put a positive or at least neutral face on the situation, litigation and local opposition to Poland Spring (which actually is a brand of international beverage company Nestle Waters) have taken their toll.

In January 2004, Tom Brennan, New England natural resources manager for Poland Spring, updated Fryeburg residents about the company's search for a site to build a third bottling plant.

"We're actively looking for locations in southern and western Maine," he said at the time. "We like Fryeburg. We like the town. We utilize Fryeburg as a source for our brand. It's high-quality water."

Poland Spring already was buying spring water in Fryeburg. By its own estimates, the company was purchasing roughly 80 million gallons of water a year through Pure Mountain Springs, an intermediary that maintains wells in Fryeburg and purchases its water from Fryeburg Water Co. (Brennan said he didn't know how much water currently is being purchased in Fryeburg. This year's withdrawals have been less than what the company withdrew in 2005, he said, but added that he didn't have any hard numbers available.)

Brennan is diplomatic about the recent opposition to increased pumping or trucking in Fryeburg as a result of the company's heightened presence.

"The dynamics in Fryeburg continue, and we want to be a productive member of those discussions," he said in a telephone interview.

It's unclear whether his company will succeed with it more modest plan — not a multi-million-dollar bottling plant but a 1,300-square-foot, single-story building and two-story, 23,000-gallon silo occupying 3 acres of a 60-acre lot in East Fryeburg. The company plans to pipe water out of Denmark to this silo and attached filling station in East Fryeburg. Then, the water will be loaded into tanker trucks — about 50 trucks every 24 hours, according to company estimates.

The permit for pumping water out of West Denmark to the East Fryeburg site allows withdrawals of up to 105 million gallons a year. Poland Spring's new permit for water pumping in Kingfield, by contrast, provides nearly double that amount — 200 million gallons a year, Brennan said.

Asked why Kingfield appeared more willing to embrace Poland Spring as a local industry, Brennan said, "I believe that reasonable people recognized that our withdrawals are sustainable."

Also, Poland Spring was a new entity to Kingfield, he noted.

"This represented sort of a clean slate, starting from scratch, and we paid a lot of attention to integrating regulators and stakeholders into the process," Brennan said.

"In terms of the water aspects of what our proposed project is going to be, there's a lot of reasonable discussion" that occurred during deliberations, he said.
Brennan concluded that Kingfield, which modified its zoning ordinance to include "aquifer dependent industries," did its homework but ultimately saw bottled water as a beneficial industry.

"Certainly, there was a lot of attention to what those withdrawals meant and their impact to users and the environment," he said.

Heather McCarthy, reporting for the Lewiston Sun Journal, described a jubilant atmosphere at the Oct. 19 Kingfield Planning Board meeting when the board gave unanimous approval for Poland Spring to build a bottling plant.

"Alison Hagerstrom, executive director of the Greater Franklin County Development Corporation, the group that worked for several years to bring the Poland Spring plant to the area, was quite pleased with the outcome," the newspaper reported. "'This is going to mean jobs, direct and indirect, and is a positive thing for Kingfield, Franklin County and the state of Maine. ... There is a work force here to fill the jobs. It's a wonderful thing, really. It's really the first big deal for the Franklin Development Corp., there will be more positive impacts that we can realize at this moment.'"

Fryeburg Selectman David Knapp declined to comment on his town's relationship with Poland Spring, citing pending litigation. But some clues about what was different in Kingfield were offered by Kingfield Planning Board Chairman David Guernsey.

In a telephone interview, Guernsey explained that the Kingfield Planning Board's conditional approval of a bottling plant came against a backdrop of economic duress for the small, rural town.

"The big thing that's hitting a lot of towns up in this neck of the woods is the demise of the forest product plants," Guernsey said. "That whole industry just has disappeared."

Also, rather than dealing with a privately owned water company and affiliated parties such as Pure Mountain Springs, Kingfield decision makers had one body to consult: the Kingfield Water District. The district is sole user of the town's aquifer. Otherwise, residents rely on private wells for water, Guernsey explained.
"It's a lot cleaner situation than what they're faced with down there," he said.

Also, Kingfield's aquifer — the underground basin of available ground water — doesn't feel the pressures of heavy use. The water district takes a little less than 1 percent of aquifer recharge, and Poland Spring is expected to take another 1.5-2 percent, based on a hydrogeological study, Guernsey said.

"I don't think we have as many using it beforehand, and we pretty much started from zero with the water district on it.

We don't have any private parties," Guernsey said.

"The bottom line is in Kingfield the board felt that they (Poland Spring) met all of the requirements of our ordinance; we went through a revision of the ordinance almost a year ago that gave better definitions to what they were trying to do. We included additional standards for water withdrawal, which is not something anyone up here ever thought of 20 years ago," Guernsey said.

Kingfield used water-extraction standards from Hollis as a baseline.

"By getting all of this out on the table before we even had an application on the table, it allowed us to lower the temperature a little bit," Guernsey said. "I think probably the issues of traffic and noise and impact were bigger."

Even then, opponents didn't gain much of a foothold.

"I think the turning point was a group of 100 people in town — and our population is only about 1,100 — 100 people signed a request for a moratorium. The moratorium went down in defeat by 325-100. That kind of put the politics of it behind us," Guernsey recalled.

Many saw the moratorium in Kingfield as an end run to force Poland Spring to look for a new site, he explained. Also, Poland Spring paid for the town to amend its ordinance and bent to other local requests, Guernsey recalled.

Finally, pure economic incentive sealed the deal. The town stipulated that Poland Spring had to bottle 55 percent of water pumped locally.

"They can ship 45 percent of it out in bulk, but they have to bottle 55 percent of it in Kingfield, and that way we get the jobs," Guernsey said.

Kingfield, while embracing Poland Spring and its jobs, also may learn that there's a down side to the bulk water-pumping business. At the very least, Fryeburg has learned that bulk water pumping can be controversial. Residents in Denmark and Fryeburg have watched regulatory approvals for Poland Spring's truck-filling station end up embroiled in litigation.

It's up to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court to decide whether to halt Poland Spring's plan for a truck-filling station along Route 302 in East Fryeburg. After Denmark selectmen approved a water-extraction permit for the well site in their town on Nov. 21, 2005, an abutter filed a lawsuit. The state granted a bulk water transport permit, but that approval also ended up in court.

In Fryeburg, the planning board gave its approval to the truck-filling station on Oct. 19, 2005. On Jan. 4, 2006, the Fryeburg Board of Appeals upheld part of a lengthy appeal of the planning board permit, finding a violation of due process rights for neighboring property owners. In Nestlé Waters North America v. Inhabitants of Town of Fryeburg, a superior court judge sent the planning board's approval back for further consideration. Nestle Waters, in turn, appealed to the state supreme court.

In yet another development, on Oct. 19, Kennebec Superior Court Judge S. Kirk Studstrup remanded the state's approval of a permit for bulk transport of water, sending it back to Maine Department of Health and Human Services for further review. In Denmark, Steve Griswold, an abutting property owner on Long Pond, filed a litigative appeal before the Oxford County Superior Court, challenging Denmark selectmen's approval of the water extraction permit. In this one instance, the court ruled in selectmen's favor, but Griswold appealed to the state supreme court.

While these complicated disputes are resolved, Brennan said the company will prepare for the "significant expansion" promised by the bottling plant.

How does Kingfield coming on line with its bottling plant affect Fryeburg?

"That's hard to predict," Brennan admitted.

The economics of pumping water out of Denmark and Fryeburg, despite the controversy it generates, makes these towns attractive sources.

"Certainly Kingfield is farther from the market," Brennan noted.

Assistant editor David Carkhuff can be contacted at david@conwaydailysun.com