http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/10/oregon_scraps_water_rights_dea.html
[links in on-line article]
Oregon scraps water rights deal for Nestle's Cascade Locks bottling plant
Updated on October 31, 2017 at 8:15 AM Posted on October 30, 2017 at 2:30 PM
By Hillary Borrud
hborrud@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
The Oregonian/OregonLive
Nestle Waters' plan to bottle water from a spring near Cascade Locks
appears to be dead, after Gov. Kate Brown directed state officials to
stop an exchange of water rights that was crucial to the deal.
In a letter to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife on Friday, the
governor asked the department's director to stop the exchange for fiscal
rather than environmental reasons. The agency will comply with the
governor's request, spokeswoman Michelle Dennehy said on Monday.
Brown did not say how much it cost state agencies, including the Oregon
Water Resources Department, to work on the water rights exchange. But
she said it would require "significant staff resources and legal costs"
going forward.
"This is of particular concern given the uncertainty around the city's
plans for a Nestle plant," Brown wrote, referring to a local ban on such
plants. Voters in Hood River County passed a measure in May 2016 to ban
large water bottling operations.
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife holds water rights to Oxbow
Springs, which it uses to supply a salmon hatchery. Two months after
Brown took office in 2015, the state agreed to a deal to transfer those
rights to Nestle Waters in exchange for the city of Cascade Locks' well
water rights.
The governor's decision on Friday leaves Cascade Locks with the option
to use city water for the Nestle bottling plant.
Nestle has been trying to nearly a decade to gain approval to bottle
water from Oxbow Springs, on a hillside just outside Cascade Locks. The
company would build a bottling plant at Cascade Locks' port and bottle
100 million gallons of the water annually under the Arrowhead brand, The
Oregonian/OregonLive has reported.
On Monday, the national group that opposed the plant, Food & Water
Watch, claimed victory. "Gov. Brown's decision to back out of this
wrongheaded deal is a hard-won victory for the communities in Hood River
County that have waged a nine-year battle to keep Nestlé from seizing
their water," the group's executive director Wenonah Hauter said in a
press release.
The plant would have brought jobs and additional tax revenue to Cascade
Locks, and Brown acknowledged in her letter that the city needs an
economic boost. Brown wrote that she directed staff in her office and at
the state's economic development agency to work with the city "to
redouble efforts to address key economic development needs, more
important than ever in the wake of the devastating Eagle Creek fire."
