By Frank Arudel
How a Multi-national Corporation Buys up a Small Town - and Then Moves on to the Next One
Water is worth millions – no billions to companies like Nestle. Their bottom line tells the story. Taking a simple thing like water and selling it for a price per gallon greater than the going price for a gallon of gas and people buy the stuff -- how does that work?
McCloud is a small hamlet, snuggled up against Mt. Shasta, one of the life sources and fountainhead of water for northern and southern California. Because of all the plumbing the state has done, we have a water deliver system spanning the entire state from north to south at a cost to the citizens of the state – you and me. Nestle came to the village of McCloud with plans to take that very same water and put it in little plastic bottles and truck it south to sell to the very same people who already can get the water from their very own tap – no bottles, no trucking, no pollution, no waste. A man by the name of Dave Palais, who works for Nestle, put the deal together, working with Pete Kampa who at that time was the manager of the McCloud Community Services District. Those two cooked the deal that would give Nestle decades of access to the source waters of Mt. Shasta.
Things didn’t quite work out for Dave and Pete. A few people got wind of the deal and started to question the contract that the McCloud Community Services District signed. It’s still being questioned.
Now here’s the interesting part. Old Pete has moved on. He now is the manager of the Tuolomne County PUD, and guess where that is? In water country, just north of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir where San Francisco gets its water. By the way, the mayor of San Francisco has banned bottled water buying for city functions.
So there you are, Nestle, on the move. In reality they move around the whole earth sucking up water to sell at those inflated prices. If you check out their annual report, bottled water is their growth industry, has been for years. It’s like the old days when patent medicine paddlers moved around the country selling archaic medical cures in little brown bottles, not unlike what Nestle is doing with water. (But by no means do I compare what they’re selling with patent medicine.)
Nestle has bought up most of the brand name water labels, like Arrowhead and Calistoga and others around the country, it’s easer to buy a brand than to create one. Coke on the other hand created a brand, but instead of bottling water from a watershed, bottles it from local taps.
Then there’s the story about a billionaire who owns a few dams on the Klamath River. What’s a billionaire doing owning some broken-down dams that fish can’t get by? It’s all about money. Stay tuned.
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