In a water crisis, why do we give it to bottling companies?

To hear Florida’s water-management districts tell it, we have a water crisis on our hands — and you need to do your part.

You can be fined for watering your lawn more than once or twice a week. And you need to install low-flow shower heads, buy more efficient toilets and limit your showers to five minutes or less.

My wife even taught me the little jingle advice for not flushing the toilet after every minor use: If it’s yellow, let it mellow.

It’s catchy. And gross.

Anyway, we’re all told we must do our part … unless you’re a bottled water company. Then, you can drain up to a million gallons a day from our dwindling aquifer, package it, ship it and sell it for profit.

This longstanding problem surfaced again last month when yet another water-management district gave permission to yet another company to use up to 984,000 gallons a day.

You’d have to let your shower run nonstop for nearly a year to use that much.

“They over-permit terribly,” said Michael Roth, the president of Our Santa Fe River, a group opposed to the most recent permit approved for Ginnie Springs west of Gainesville. “It just doesn’t seem to bother them.”

They are the members of Florida’s water-management boards — agencies set up decades ago to protect Florida’s dwindling water supply. Long ago, governors put environmentalists on these environmental boards. Now they pick developers and timber execs.

Roth says he understands water is needed for all sorts of industrial purposes. But he argues this is one of the worst. “This is being pulled out, put in plastic bottles and sent all over the world,” he said. “It does not return to our system.”

The part about the water being shipped elsewhere is what troubles me most. In fact, I’ve come up with a slogan of my own, in the spirit of that yellow-mellow one.

When companies want permits to drain our aquifer: If the water’s leaving town, turn it down.

My thinking on permits for bottled water has evolved over the years. At first, I didn’t like the idea at all. But a colleague asked me to think more about the water-supply aspect.

His main observation: As far as water levels go, it doesn’t really matter whether we drink 12 ounces of water from a tap or 12 ounces from a bottle. The effect on the aquifer is the same.

The problem happens when we suck water from the dwindling Floridan aquifer and ship it elsewhere. That’s a net loss.

So Florida needs to enact some new regulations that bottlers can’t ship our spring water elsewhere. Again: If it’s leaving town, turn it down.

Now, none of this addresses the plastic-bottling aspect that drives some people nuts. It’ a fair debate, but also separate from the issue of safeguarding Florida’s water supply — and one that, if had fairly, would also apply to soda, Gatorade and everything else.

In this most recent case, members of the Suwannee River Water Management District tried to turn down the permit … at first.

Members of the district that includes Gainesville and much of North Florida rejected a request from a company called Seven Springs that wanted to take about 1 million gallons of water each day and pump much of it to a Nestlé Waters bottling facility.

It was a big deal the board said no. But the applicants appealed, and an administrative judge sided with the permit-seekers, saying the district hadn’t properly or effectively raised all its objections.

That’s why Roth says water board members still shirked their duties by botching the original denial and not mustering up an appeal or counter to the judge. “I have so given up on the water management districts as being protectors of anything,” Roth said.

That’s why Florida should enact guidelines that say water sucked from our aquifer can’t be shipped elsewhere. This should be a statewide policy, not a decision subject to the whims of local water board members.