Florida mulls charging bottlers for state water

McClatchy Newspapers

LEE, Fla. — In a rural North Florida town where the water tower bears the motto, “Tiny but Proud,” residents have a big secret: They give the cold, clear spring water that bubbles up from the aquifer below their soil to the nation’s largest bottled-water company — for free.

Every day, Nestle Waters of North America sucks up an estimated 500,000 gallons from Madison Blue Springs, a limestone basin a mile north of town. It pipes the 70-degree water a mile to its massive bottling plant and distribution center, fills 102,000 plastic containers an hour, pastes on Deer Park or Zephyrhills labels, boxes it up and ships half of it out of state.

The cost to the company for the water: a one-time, $150 local water permit.

Like 22 other bottled-water companies in Florida, including giants Coca-Cola and Pepsi Co., Nestle’s profit is 10 to 100 times the cost of each bottle.

Payment to the state? Not a dime.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist wants to change that. He is proposing a 6-cents-a-gallon state tax on water used for commercial water-bottling purposes.

“It’s a resource of the state and if you’re going to withdraw it for a profit, we should charge you for that use,” said Mike Sole, secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, which has been developing Crist’s proposal for six months.

Some states, including Vermont and Michigan, already impose user fees on bottled-water companies, while Massachusetts has begun debating a ban on extracting water for commercial uses.

The idea isn’t completely new to Florida. In 2005, the state’s House Democratic leader, Franklin Sands, proposed legislation imposing a fee on bottled water but the measure was killed in the state’s Senate.

“The water belongs to the people,” Sands said. “If you take the people’s water, it’s about time we compensate them for it.”

Throughout the nation, the bottled water industry is under increasing attack. At the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Miami last June, mayors adopted a resolution to encourage cities “to phase out, where feasible, government use of bottled water and promote the importance of municipal water.”