Time to end the corporate giveaway of Florida’s water
Nestlé wants a permit to drain about a million gallons of water a day from the aquifer in North Florida. The company will use it to bottle and sell water under brand names like Deer Park and Zephyrhills.
This is an opportune time to remind everyone that Nestlé Waters North America will pay nothing for that water. Zero.
The same goes for water bottlers in other parts of the state, including Niagara Bottling. It got a permit back in 2014 to withdraw about 900,000 gallons a day of free groundwater in Lake County, which it also uses to bottle and sell. The request was spectacularly unpopular with the public, but regional water managers approved it anyway.
What does Florida gain from this? Local governments collect property taxes and the bottling companies provide some jobs. That’s about all.
This state-sanctioned corporate freebie is distinct from other profit-making operations that extract Florida’s other natural resources, like oil, natural gas, sand, gravel and phosphate. They pay a tax for the privilege of using what Florida has. Water producers don’t.
(In fairness, we should pause and acknowledge that Nestlé is required to pay a one-time permit application fee of $115 as a condition of getting more than 1 million gallons of free water per day for the next 20 years.)
The Nestlé permit shows two wells not far from Ginnie Springs, a lovely camping, swimming and diving spot north of Gainesville that flows into the Santa Fe River.
But all is not well with Ginnie, or the Santa Fe.
A report by the Howard T. Odum Springs Institute, which rated the overall health of Florida’s springs from A to F, gave Ginnie a D+. The low grade was due partly to the diminished flow of water from the spring.
The more water you pump from the aquifer, the less water emerges from a spring. Less water coming from springs means less water for rivers, which is one of the reasons the Santa Fe River’s water quality has degraded.
Officials with the state’s water management districts are quick to point out that water bottlers account for a tiny fraction of the water that can get sucked out of the aquifer each day.
For example, bottlers in the St. Johns River Water Management District are permitted to take up to 2.5 million gallons out of the ground each day. That’s a small fraction of the 1.3 billion gallons that public utilities, agriculture and industry are permitted to take each day.
OK, but we’re fairly certain that water managers wouldn’t be equally receptive to that tiny fraction defense if a homeowner gets caught watering their lawn on a day they’re not supposed to. Every little bit counts and they know it, especially when that little bit amounts to a corporate giveaway.
If the state insists on allowing out-ofstate companies to bottle our water and sell it for a profit across state lines, we ought to at least get paid for it.
In 2009, former Gov. Charlie Crist proposed a 6-cent severance tax on each gallon of water the bottling companies take from the ground. That perfectly reasonable idea went nowhere. Neither did a proposal to eliminate the sales tax exemption for bottled water.
To summarize, Florida doesn’t tax the producer for taking the water and doesn’t tax the consumer for buying it. It’s as if the state has an unlimited supply of water (it doesn’t).
Bottlers argue that water is necessary for life, therefore it should be treated differently. Water from a plastic bottle isn’t the only way to stay alive. The tap works just fine for most people in most circumstances.
It’s also much cheaper to buy and it doesn’t produce an empty plastic bottle that — more often than not these days — will end up in a landfill, where it’ll take 400 to 500 years to break down.
Florida is willfully allowing itself to get taken to the cleaners.
Editorials are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board and are written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jay Reddick, David Whitley, Shannon Green and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.