Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [72]
Fletcher sits down, looking a bit overwhelmed, and the town votes.
It’s been said by water activists that the fight over water is a fight for democracy itself. And of course there’s nothing like the arrival of a large corporation in a small town to test the limits of civility, self-interest, and free speech. People who’ve never read their town bylaws or land-use tables get out their dictionaries, neighbors come out against neighbors, the feet of elected or appointed officials are held to the fire. The pattern has been the same in states all over the country. Nestlé arrives, property is purchased, information is presented at endless meetings, and a juggernaut is set in motion. Inevitably, some residents feel excluded from the process: they feel that documents aren’t made available in a timely manner, that questions aren’t fully answered. Planning boards move to closed session. Rumors of corruption fly; citizens sue to halt operations, injunctions are filed, then appealed. It is wearing, and it is expensive.
In Maine and elsewhere, bottling opponents have accused Nestlé of placing “operatives” in town ahead of their arrival—to grease the wheels, scope the competition, and make sure key local officials are onboard. Whether or not it’s true, some believe Gene Bergoffen plays that role in Fryeburg. He moved to town five years before the town started fighting over water (though he summered here as a child). A former Washington attorney, he quickly tried to work himself into the local fabric, becoming a trustee of a regional conservation group, seeking a position on the board of directors at a nearby hospital, becoming the head of the Lovewell Pond Association, a member of the town’s planning board, and finally its chairman. Dearborn alleges that Bergoffen is “getting paid by Nestlé to screw things up.”
Bergoffen denies the claim, of course, and says he currently has no connection to Nestlé, though he was, from 1989 to 1997, the CEO of the National Private Truck Council, which lobbies on behalf of private trucking fleets and counts among its thousand-plus members Nestlé Waters North America. Bergoffen is currently president of MaineWay services, which consults with trucking fleets and other clients (not Nestlé) on issues of trucking safety, management, and trucking policy.
It’s easy to cast water battles as David-and-Goliath dramas, with small-town innocents up against rich and experienced corporations. Peter Crabb, who lives downstream of Nestlé’s New Tripoli, Pennsylvania, operation, summarized his experience with the company in a post to AlterNet: “This Swiss corporation came into our tiny rural American community and bullied residents and bribed local officials to look the other way while they had their way with our water supply.” Now diesel trucks clog the narrow roadways, he says, and lower water levels in the creek have decimated fish populations. In Mecosta County, Michigan, where Nestlé bottles springwater under the Ice Mountain label, the company promised good jobs at the bottling plant, but they didn’t materialize. Instead, say anti-Nestlé activists, the company hired temporary workers, who receive no benefits and no compensation when they are laid off.
Residents of McCloud, California, population eighteen hundred, learned in the fall of 2003 of Nestlé’s intentions to pump and bottle, under the Arrowhead label, 522 million gallons of springwater a year. Its plant, at a million square feet, would be the largest in the nation. The water flows from two