Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [70]
Turley’s concern about a takeover isn’t idle: globalization activists fear that once citizens are accustomed to paying more for water—by buying it bottled instead of drinking it from the tap—they won’t balk at paying higher rates to a private company, from outside the community, state, or even country, that runs their municipal system. Already the baseline is shifting. Across the country and around the world, private water companies have been making deals with public water utilities saddled with crumbling infrastructure and heavy debt. (Aware that privatization is considered by some a dirty word, some multinational water corporations—not to be confused with locally owned water companies—have switched to calling the arrangements “public-private partnerships,” in which, broadly speaking, the municipality continues to own the utility, but the private firm operates and manages all or part of it.)
As documented in Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water, these well-funded private companies offer to fix the pipes and deliver water, but many communities end up with higher rates, staff layoffs, less access to information, and declining service. When public utilities raise rates, the increase goes toward repairs, not Christmas bonuses for shareholders. Several U.S. cities have sued to regain control of their water systems from private companies. Other places—Gary, Indiana, and thirty communities in Boone County, West Virginia, among them—are happy with such arrangements.
“It’s odd for a man in my position to say I don’t trust Poland Spring,” Turley continues, sipping his tea. “They argue as if it were a divine right to make as much money as they can. It would be cheaper for them to buy us off than to go through the court system.” He turns to look out the window, into his snowy yard.
I ask what he wants Poland Spring to do. “Maybe profit sharing is the answer,” Turley says, knowing it is too late for the company to pull out of town.
“Don’t they already give money to the town?”
“Yes, but the donations are transparently manipulative.”
“What would real generosity look like?”
Turley shrugs. “I don’t know—it would just feel different. It’s like the definition of pornography: I can’t describe it but I know it when I see it. They could build up an endowment fund—they could show a concern for our economic ecosystem.”
When Jim Wilfong talks about taxing Poland Spring’s water withdrawals in Maine, he sometimes drops in the word Alaska. It’s a loaded reference, likely to spark thoughts of the Alaska Permanent Fund, a state-run program that puts an annual dividend from the sale of North Slope oil in the pocket of nearly every Alaska resident (in 2007, the dividend was $1,654). The reference links oil with water, and it reminds folks that the state’s natural resources are just that: naturally occurring. (Though here the similarities stop: bottled water costs more than gasoline, on a per liter basis, despite the fact that oil is far more expensive to pull from the ground, to process, and to transport.)
As residents approach the mike in the fire station to speak about the water ordinance, it becomes clear that while some distrust those who wrote the document or have a moral objection to selling water for profit, many others are concerned mostly with economic justice, with the whopping disparity between what Nestlé pays for water (nothing, in those towns where it owns or leases land) and what it makes by selling it. “People have been talking about balance,” says Ken Brown, a burly man in a plaid jacket. “We have a gentleman here that’s trying to run a farm, and he has to jump through hoops [if the ordinance passes] and spend money if he breaks a level of ten thousand gallons a day. And he’s up against a company that has stacks and stacks of water at our town meeting that is worth billions of dollars.” Brown turns and points