State OKs Nestlé plan to tap 1 million gallons a day from Florida spring for bottled water
In the face of stark opposition from environmentalists, a state water board on Tuesday unanimously approved “with protest” Nestlé’s bid to pump one million gallons daily for its bottled water business from one of the treasured natural springs along the Santa Fe River in northcentral Florida.
Critics promised immediately to appeal the decision on Ginnie Springs by the seven-member governing board of the Suwannee
River Water Management District. The approval was expected but still a blow to activists, who said further pumping of the crystal blue waters would put at risk the health of an already taxed river and a network of springs that make up its surrounding ecosystem.
At nearly 60 feet deep, set among a 200-acre forest, Ginnie Springs is one of Florida’s most popular freshwater diving locations and enormously popular among swimmers, paddlers and naturalists.
The decision, after a fourhour board meeting and about 19,000 written public comments to the district, culminated a fight that extended almost two years and drew international attention.
But environmental activists say they will continue to work to stop the permit. Merrillee Malwitz-Jipson of the group Our Santa Fe
River said advocates’ next step will be to sue the district. “The communities do not want this,” she said.
The district previously indicated it would not approve the “consumptive use” permit, but a state administrative judge, G.W. Chisenhall, last year backed a legal appeal. He ruled that the bottled water would be of “beneficial use,” one of the legal standards in such cases, and ordered the board to reconsider.
Tom Reeves, the board’s lawyer, said that ruling effectively tied the board’s hands, meaning the conditions that they could use to deny were out of their jurisdiction. That led the board Tuesday to approve the permit benefiting Nestlé but “with protest” — a move that technically preserves legal options to continue appealing the decision. But Reeves told the board there was no requirement to take further steps, and some board members said after the vote they were ready to stop fighting.
Still, Doug Manson, the attorney for the local company, Seven Springs Water Co., which sought the pumping permit, objected to the provisional nature of the approval. “There should be a finality to this,” he said.
The board’s decision renews an expired water use permit for Seven Springs to provide water for bottling operations to Nestlé, which produces the Zephyrhills and Pure Life brands. The company had previously
been withdrawing water from the springs in lower amounts. Nestlé, a Swiss multinational food and beverage company, said the springs could accommodate its pumping and pledged to work with local officials to ensure the spring remains sustainable.
Ahead of the decision, Nestlé had been airing political advertisements on network television stations across the region noting that it employs hundreds of people as part of its bottling business.
The Ginnie Springs bottling plant has operated since 1998, but Nestlé bought it in 2019 and aims to dramatically expand pumping there in a business that has been incredibly lucrative for the company and others in the bottled water industry. Last week, Nestlé coincidentally announced
it would be selling its North American spring water brands, which include regional brands in other states and Canada, for $4.3 billion.
The debate laid bare competing public interests in Florida: Successive Republican governors and the GOP-controlled Legislature have aggressively courted economic development in the face of criticism they have been insensitive to environmental threats from corporate activities. Many residents consistently express they care deeply about the state’s natural habitats, including its beaches, natural springs and the Everglades wetlands that extend across South Florida.
All the board’s members were appointed by Florida’s most recent Republican governors, Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis. Scott’s environmental
record has been criticized as dismal. DeSantis has acknowledged climate change threats and pushed some Everglades restoration projects but he also signed into law a measure last year that prohibits local governments from granting the environment legal rights. That law, intended to tackle water pollution, foreclosed as a legal strategy the so-called Rights of Nature movement to improve environmental protections for rivers, springs, mountains, forests and glaciers.
A wide range of critics on Tuesday urged the board to deny the permit, including local and state environment alists, generations of Floridians, a Weeki Wachee Springs mermaid, University of Florida students and professors, and out-of-state callers.
Ginnie Springs is just one of 11 springs in the area, with a combined discharge of 260 million gallons per day, according to figures from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. But Michael Roth, Our Santa Fe River president, said the system is already overtapped. He said consumption permits would have to be reduced by 30% for the springs to be healthy again. “It is self-renewing, but there’s a limit,” he said. “And we are way beyond that limit.”
John S. Quarterman of the Waterkeeper Alliance, told the board that if it had blocked the request for Nestlé, the board would almost certainly be sued by corporate interests and DeSantis would fire members from their political appointments. But he urged them to block the permit anyway. “Do you really need this job?” he asked. He urged them: “At some point it’s best just to stand on principle.”
There was some support for the deal as well. Employment was important to three workers of a Gilchrist County Nestlé bottling factory who backed the permit.
“For generations, our company has contributed to the state of the strong corporate citizen, providing good paying jobs with benefits in a socially responsible, clean manufacturing industry that supports our families and local community,” said factory manager Lane Tuten, who brought a poster with an image of the factory and employees’ signatures.
Three former top Capitol security officials deflected responsibility at a Senate hearing on Tuesday for security failures that contributed to the Jan. 6 riot, blaming other agencies, each other and at one point even a subordinate for the breakdowns that allowed hundreds of Trump supporters to storm the Capitol.
Their testimony illustrated the chaos of the day, suggesting that officials were reluctant to accept responsibility for the politically charged issue of calling in
National Guard troops even as the violence escalated. It also showed that the overlapping jurisdictions of the Capitol Police, the District of Columbia government and other agencies created utter confusion that hindered attempts to stop the most violent assault on the Capitol since the War of 1812.
The officials testified that the FBI and the intelligence community had failed to provide adequate warnings that rioters planned to seize the Capitol and that the Pentagon was too slow after the attack began to authorize guard troops to help overwhelmed police. They also gave their own conflicting accounts of communicating with each other as they sought to quell the riot in its early minutes.
“None of the intelligence we received predicted what actually occurred,” the former Capitol Police Chief Steven A. Sund told senators. He called the riot “the worst attack on law enforcement and our democracy that I have seen” and said he witnessed insurrectionists assaulting officers not only with their fists, but also with pipes, sticks, bats, metal barricades and flagpoles.
“These criminals came prepared for war,” Sund said.
He and two of the other officials – the former House sergeant-at-arms, Paul D. Irving, and his Senate counterpart, Michael C. Stenger, the top two security officials at the Capitol on the day of the assault – did acknowledge their own mistakes, as well. Sund admitted that his staff had never trained for such a wide-scale intrusion and lacked proper protective equipment.
Coming a month and a half after the siege, the testimony was the first highprofile public hearing in what is expected to be a lengthy series of investigations into the attack. It provided the most detailed account of the security mistakes leading up to – and during – the nearly five-hour siege during and after which five people died and nearly 150 officers were injured.
Senators deemed the lapses a “failure of imagination” to consider that hundreds of rioters would be willing to storm the Capitol – a refrain frequently invoked by officials nearly two decades ago to explain the security breakdown that led to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“There’s no question in my mind that there was a failure to take this threat more seriously, despite widespread social media content and public reporting that indicated violence was extremely likely,” said Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Former President Donald Trump was rarely mentioned during the nearly four-hour hearing, despite his perpetuation of the baseless claims of widespread election fraud and his encouragement of his supporters to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6 to pressure lawmakers to stop the certification of the presidential election. Senate aides said lawmakers coming off the impeachment this month wanted to focus more narrowly on security issues.
Clear disputes emerged among the officials about how they prepared for Jan. 6 and made decisions that day. The two sergeants-atarms have come under scrutiny amid reports, including from Sund, that they acted too slowly in calling for the National Guard.
Irving said he rejected Sund’s account that he had turned down guard support because of “optics,” calling the claim “categorically false.”
Irving also disputed
Sund’s timeline of the events on Jan. 6 that indicated the former sergeant-at-arms had waited about a half-hour to contact political leaders about calling for the guard.
Sund said he contacted Irving seeking guard support at 1:09 p.m. Jan. 6. Irving said the call did not come until 1:28. He added that no Senate nor House leader slowed down a request for the guard.
The conflicting accounts prompted criticism.
“Instead of cohesive leadership, we heard Stenger, Irving and former Chief Sund give contradicting accounts about the department’s handling of requests for backup from the National Guard,” Gus Papathanasiou, the chairman of the Capitol Police union, said after the hearing. “It’s maddening.”
Some Republicans have sought to play down the severity of the attack, including Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who falsely blamed “provocateurs” and “fake Trump protesters” for the violence. The witnesses knocked down such claims, repeatedly saying that the siege was planned, that rioters coordinated with one another and that white supremacists were involved.