Looking to profit, timber firm tells Calif. town to find new water source
WEED, Calif. — The water that gurgles from a spring on the edge of this Northern California logging town is so pristine that for more than a century it has been piped directly to the wooden homes spread across hills and gullies.
To the residents of Weed, which sits in the foothills of Mount Shasta, a snowcapped dormant volcano, the spring water is a blessing during a time of severe and prolonged drought.
To the lumber company that owns the land where the spring is, the water is a business opportunity.
Roseburg Forest Products, an Oregon-based company that owns the pine forest where the spring surfaces, is demanding that the city of Weed get its water elsewhere.
“The city needs to actively look for another source of water,” said Ellen Porter, director of environmental affairs for Roseburg who led the company’s negotiations with the city. “Roseburg is not in a position to guarantee the availability of that water for a long period of time.”
For the past 50 years, the company charged the city $1 a year for use of water from the Beaughan Spring. As of July, it began charging $97,500 annually. A contract signed this year directs the city to look for alternative sources.
Roseburg has not made public what it plans to do with the water it wants to take back from the city. But it already sells water to Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring, which bottles it in Weed and ships it as far away as Japan. Crystal Geyser is looking to increase its overall supply.
Residents of Weed, including the current mayor and three former mayors, say the water was always intended for municipal and domestic use and should not be sold to the highest bidder.
“Thecorporate mentality is that they can make more money selling this water to Japan,” said Bob Hall, a former mayor of Weed and currently a member of the City Council. “We were hooked at the hip with this company for years,” he said of the timber company, the largest private employer in the area. “Now, they are takingadvantageofpeoplewho can’t defend themselves.”
A measure on the ballot in the November election in Siskiyou County, where the towns are, would for the first time require that companies obtain permits to export water.
The mayor of Weed, Ken Palfini, said the value of the city’s water was emphasized during a visit several weeks ago by Pierre Papillaud, the founder of the company that owns Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring.
In what the mayor and another participant described as a tirade of abuse, Papillaud demanded that the city give up its spring water so that his company could have more.
“He said if he didn’t get his way, he was going to blow up the bottling plant,” Palfini said of Papillaud’s visit. “He said that twice.”
Porter blamed Hall and others in the city for casting Roseburg in a bad light.
“We are becoming the corporate bad guy, and that’s really unfortunate,” she said. The city already has wells that serve around half the population, she said.