Earlier this month, the 1,000 residents of Osceola Township, Michigan, won a temporary victory over Nestle when the state Court of Appeals ruled that Nestle’s claims to the contrary, bottled water is not an “essential public service.” The ruling came in a case where Nestle was trying to force the township to allow the company to build a booster pump in the middle of a children’s summer camp. But while water advocates are happy about their temporary victory against the company, they are still geared up for a long fight ahead.
Currently, Nestle is allowed to take 250 gallons a minute—more than 1 million gallons per day—of Michigan groundwater for which the company pays all of $200 a year. In April 2018, then-Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration decided despite a huge public outcry that Nestle could take even more water from Michigan residents: 400 gallons per minute, for the same low price. Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation and the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians contested that decision this past summer and are still waiting for a decision from an administrative law judge with the state’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs.
The Court of Appeals decision was about a proposed booster pump that would have allowed Nestle to start taking that 400 gallons per minute from the residents of Osceola County. But despite the election of Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, local residents still aren’t seeing much relief. “So far, we’ve been having difficulty getting the meetings that we would like to have with the new administration,” Peggy Case, the president of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, told Daily Kos.
During her campaign, Whitmer issued a policy document saying “Being good stewards of the Great Lakes means we have a responsibility to ensure the longevity of our freshwater resources for generations to come, not selling it at a nominal price for sale outside of our borders,” and promising that “we need a way to control the siphoning of water for water bottling and my administration will work to see it done.”
Case said that, for area residents, it’s long past time for the Whitmer administration to exercise that control. Last summer, she said, her organization “did some citizen science,” taking measurements which showed that the water level in two area creeks, Chippewa and Twin creeks, “are way too low to sustain trout populations,” even though groundwater levels throughout the rest of the state are at an all-time high.
“Everywhere you go, you go on the Great Lakes and in the rivers and streams, the water is very high. Except it's not high in those two creeks; it's in fact low, lower than it used to be,” because of Nestle’s thirst to continue raking in more than $300 million from sales of Michigan’s water alone.
People living in the area have also been affected. Some residents are watching their ponds dry up, and others are seeing negative effects on their wells. Case added that when Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation presented their data to Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) “it was totally ignored.”
An EGLE spokesperson declined to directly answer a Daily Kos question about what the Whitmer administration is doing to protect Michiganders’ water from private companies, saying that “EGLE is not commenting on the pending matter” of the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation’s action before the administrative law judge.
After reminding this reporter that the Nestle permit “was issued by the DEQ (now EGLE) during the prior administration,” strategic communications advisor Scott Dean did share some good news: Because Nestle’s permit was issued under the state’s Safe Drinking Water Act, the administrative law judge’s decision is not subject to a controversial review board set up by former Gov. Snyder and legislative Republicans during last year’s lame duck session to give industry power over the state government’s ability to create environmental regulations. However, Nestle will be able to take the state to court if the administrative law judge sides with Michiganders trying to protect their water from the company.
Michigan is far from alone in its fight against Nestle and other companies that are seeking to privatize water. Mary Grant, director of Food and Water Watch’s Public Water for All Campaign, told Daily Kos that residents in Florida and Maine have been fighting Nestle with mixed success. In an October report, the Guardian provided an overview of struggles that residents from California and Pennsylvania to Maine are having with the company.
And, according to the Guardian report, the issue is also a problem at the national level: former Agriculture secretary Ann Veneman, a George W. Bush appointee, sits on Nestle’s board. The U.S. Forest Service has also fallen into line, allowing the company to take 45 million gallons of water in one year from California’s Strawberry Creek.
Some areas in the country have already been put in the rock and a hard place position between their residents’ needs for water in drought conditions and Nestle’s desire for profit. In February, the company finally closed a plant in Phoenix, Arizona, that was originally announced in 2016. The company also ignored the 2011-2017 California drought.
Despite the depressing outlook overall in the fight to protect water from profiteers, one area has scored a clear win for local residents’ right to access their own water. In 2016 voters in Hood River County, Oregon, voted to ban large water pumping operations, including Nestle’s plan to take 100 million gallons of water a year from the county’s Oxbow Springs. The move was supported by Democratic Gov. Kate Brown, who in 2017 directed state officials to stop a water rights exchange that would have been essential to Nestle’s plans.
The Cascade Locks legislation “is really a powerful model and one we hope will be replicated across the country,” Grant said.
“There are some of these cases where people are winning against these water multinationals, but it just means that we have to fight harder and smarter,” said Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-founder of the Poor People’s Campaign. The human right to water is one of the group’s driving principles.
At least a few of Michigan’s legislators are on board with preserving Michigan water for Michigan residents. Earlier this month, bills were introduced in Michigan’s state House that would put the state’s water, including groundwater, in a public trust. Democratic state Rep. Yousef Rabhi said the goal of the proposed legislation is to “stop the theft of our water.”
These bills, and firm action from the Whitmer administration, can’t come soon enough for residents of Osceola County. According to Case of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, Nestle has threatened to increase trucking on the area’s rural roads or even to add another pipeline so it can start taking 400 gallons per minute of county residents’ water. There is also the very real possibility that the company will appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court.
Case told Daily Kos that activists and residents are getting tired of doing the state government’s job. “We feel that it's really not right that small grassroots organizations such as ours have to spend buckets of money to try to get Nestle to follow the law when that should be the state's responsibility to do that,” she said. “We want to know when they are going to get busy and” protect Osceola county’s water from Nestle.
Dawn Wolfe is a freelance writer and journalist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.
