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Almost daily I get a call from somebody in town, asking me if I will join the local Davids in their struggle against the Nestlé Goliath. To date I have resisted, because as nearly as I can tell, it's not that big a deal.
There are two springs in the Nathrop area, about 15 miles north of Salida. Nestlé proposes to tap about a tenth of the springs' flow, pipe it to Johnson's Village at the junction of U.S. 24 and U.S. 285), then truck it to a new bottling plant in Denver to emerge as . Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water.
It's pretty hard to portray Nestlé as a benevolent force -- recall its efforts to promote its baby formula in the Third World? -- so I won't even try. Nor is it easy to defend bottled water in general.
I buy Hershey's chocolate and drink tap water from an
expensive but useful Camelbak portable personal
hydration system
that doesn't spill when I accidentally
tip it while reaching for the telephone.
Those are personal decisions, although if everyone made the same ones, there wouldn't be a Nestlé controversy here or anywhere else. But bottled water is a legitimate business, whether I like it or not.
Nestlé plans to take about 200 acre-feet a year (about 125 gallons a minute) from the Arkansas River's flow. That's not enough to notice for floating or fishing purposes or any other perceptible environmental effect.
In Colorado Water Jargon, Nestlé is a
consumptive use
from a junior right.
Nestlé will have to make that up so that downstream
users with senior water rights are not injured -- a process
called augmentation. Thus Nestlé needs to buy
augmentation water, and this could have forced the company
to spend some serious money hereabouts.
A few years ago, the city of Salida bought the Vandaveer Ranch on the edge of town, mostly for its water rights, some as old as 1864. The Salida plan was solicit development proposals, pick one, and sell most of the land to the developer; the money would pay for the ranch. But the chosen developer coouldn't come up with the money.
If Salida could lease augmentation water -- water that the city doesn't currently need -- to Nestlé for 10 or 20 years, then money would flow into the city treasury without developing nearby open space.
And the more opposition there was to Nestlé, the more the company ought to be willing to pay. It's the American Way -- nothing wrong with getting bought off as long as you get a good price, right?
Last summer I toured the springs with Bruce Lauerman, natural resources manager for Nestlé North America's western division. He asked me what I'd do for augmentation if I were Nestlé, and I said that Nestlé was big enough and rich enough to just buy 200 acre-feet of Twin Lakes water (imported from the Western Slope) and be done with it.
Oh, no,
he said. We want to do what's best for
Chaffee County.
I replied that spending a pile of money
with the city of Salida would be good.
However, it now appears that Nestlé is working on a deal with the city of Aurora, which also seems to have acquired more water than it needs, now that home construction is a dormant industry.
Somehow, it doesn't seem like what's best for Chaffee
County
for Nestlé to be cutting checks to Aurora
to replace water it's taking out of Chaffee County. But
then again, every tanker truck of water that leaves is that
much less for a developer here. and maybe that's what is
best for Chaffee County.
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