Plan to Sell Water Roils Town
Back when this was just another timber town, a comfortable place where the lumber company owned the grocery store, hotel and every house, no one thought a lick about water. A reliable torrent poured from springs fed by the glacial melt off nearby Mt. Shasta.
Now big lumber is dead, the sawmill shuttered. And tiny McCloud is at odds over its water.
Nestle, the multinational food giant and world leader in bottled water with the Perrier, Calistoga and Arrowhead brands, has grand plans for McCloud, a town loaded with scenic charm but stuck in an economic rut.
The old mill is slated for replacement by a cavernous bottling plant, roomy enough for every home in McCloud, population 1,300. Nestle promised jobs, fiscal security. Old-timers envisioned a rebirth, a company town for the 21st century.
But the ardor has cooled in some quarters. Nettlesome questions have reared up -- about environmental degradation and mountain highways clogged by trucks carting away McCloud’s water, about undesirable socioeconomic ramifications and about the isolated community’s place in world trade.
Foes, including a number of relative newcomers to the mountain hamlet, say the arrival of a corporate power bent on replacing the timber industry with yet another form of resource extraction is the wrong destiny for McCloud. The town stands to get roughly a penny for every 17 gallons Nestle can bottle.
“We feel mugged,” Janet Connaughton, a Marin County transplant who co-owns McCloud Book Gallery. “This town shouldn’t sell its birthright for a few dollars.”
The plant has plenty of promoters, particularly among McCloud’s old guard -- the out-of-work millwrights, old sawyers and other castoffs from the lumber days. As they see it, McCloud is like so many other remote towns in California: short on choices as it struggles to map a new future.
Former lumberman Ron Berryman is galled by the environmental ethos he believes is driving the opposition. “These sorts of people did their level best to put the timber industry out of business,” he said. “Now they’re asking us to reject a bottled water plant. How much cleaner can you get? Bottled air?”
For much of the past century, the town has remained blissfully clear of such dissension. Tucked between Dogwood Butte and Timbleberry Ridge with Mt. Shasta a majestic backdrop, the town basked in the embrace of what locals called “Mother McCloud,” the McCloud River Lumber Co.
Every resident worked for the company and paid rock-bottom rents straight from each paycheck. Every child went to the same school; every mom shopped at the same company market. On Thanksgiving, the company sent free turkeys home with workers. At the annual company Christmas party, a sumptuous affair held at the local theater, the curtain raised to reveal Santa Claus and a mound of wrapped gifts, one for every kid.
The slide away from company rule started in 1963, as the timber firm began selling off the homes and businesses. Employment sagged from a high of more than 800. Families fled and bedrock businesses folded. Last year, the mill closed for good.
New arrivals are mostly retirees or urban dwellers grabbing a second home amid the conifers. McCloud got gray. The high school once housed 150 students. Now enrollment teeters around 10 or 11, depending on the week. The side of the gymnasium is still emblazoned by big block letters, “Home of the Loggers,” but the town hasn’t fielded a football team since the late 1990s.
Eager for new blood, the town’s fiscally beleaguered community services district -- the agency that collects trash, clears snow and handles most other civic tasks -- has for a decade been trying to tap into the bottled water craze, now a $8.3-billion worldwide business.
Several business proposals flew and flopped until Nestle came to town a couple years ago.
With no fanfare, Nestle Waters North America Inc., a $2.1-billion arm of the Swiss company, sealed a long-term deal with the service district’s board a year ago. The contract, running 50 years with another half-century renewal clause, initially calls for Nestle to pay $295,000 annually for more than 520 million gallons of water tapped from the three springs that feed McCloud.
Most residents were dazzled when the multinational came courting. Nestle promised a million-square-foot bottling plant -- more than 20 acres under one roof -- and jobs for more than 200 workers, pumping out nearly $20 million in payroll over the first six years.
Less than 15% of the annual water supply would flow to the plant, service district officials say. The town, they reasoned, was losing nearly that much from its antique redwood pipeline, finally replaced last year.
Dave Palais, the company’s natural resource manager and point man in McCloud, has done his best to convince locals that Nestle has the best interests of all at heart. He is a fixture around town, talking up locals, volunteering for the dunk tank at the recent lumberjack fiesta.
“It’s a good site, a great opportunity for the town,” he said. “This is a clean, sustainable industry.” The company is trying hard to prove itself a good corporate partner, while opponents seem bent mostly on “trying to scare people,” he said.
“Flatlanders,” old-timers call newcomers from the Bay Area and Southern California.
“They want their cappuccino shop on the corner, but they don’t want what it takes to support it,” groused Dan Simons, owner of a general goods store that sells hardware, fishing tackle and just about anything else. “This will buy us some stability. Right now we’re dying, because the economy is based on second homes.”
Bob Leatherman, 77, came to town at age 22 and retired as the logging company’s state timber land manager. He sees the water as a use-it or lose-it proposition.
“You guys in L.A. will get it” if it’s not bottled, he said. “Send it down the creek and it’ll be pumped over the Tehachapis.”
Lori Vance has lived in town four years, but she doesn’t think that tenure disqualifies her from caring about McCloud’s future. She worries that many residents retain a “company-town mentality” and see in Nestle a second coming of corporate paternalism.
But doubters worry about Nestle’s reputation as a tough international conglomerate, dogged for decades by a boycott over its push to market baby formula in the Third World.
Nestle and other water bottlers are currently embroiled in fights in other parts of the country -- Michigan, Maine and New Hampshire -- over the fate of springs. In an increasingly thirsty world, corporations have taken up water as a commodity to be exported around the world.
In McCloud, international trade concerns were overshadowed by a growing ill ease over the way the deal was done. The service district board approved the contract the same night most residents got a first look at it.
They were aghast at the century-long length and low-rent returns per gallon. They fretted about hundreds of trucks growling up Snowmans Hill, tying up traffic on the two-lane highway out of town. They worried about water and air pollution, and scoffed about low-wage jobs.
“You can’t live on $8 an hour,” said Al Franklin, 85, a former sawyer at the mill. “If we get 50 jobs out of this, we’re lucky.”
But mostly, they’ve grumbled about boreholes.
A common tactic in the bottled water industry, boreholes are considered the most sanitary way to tap the frigid waters of an underground spring. (McCloud currently collects its water at the surface.)
Not even plant supporters like the idea of boreholes. Mt. Shasta’s volcanic past created Swiss-cheese soils, terrain riddled with tunnels where lava once flowed and voids. A wayward drill, many residents fear, could send underground water in a new direction.
Emilo Chiarucci, 76, has seen those fluid dynamics in action. He remembers a well drilled years ago out near the main highway. They hit water, then eager for more, went deeper. The flow abruptly disappeared. A lava tube took it, Chiarucci concluded. “It was like someone pulled the plug.”
Palais of Nestle said the company is aware of community concerns and intends to use boreholes only as a last resort, and even then with the utmost caution. The factory won’t have any smokestacks or emissions, he said.
Those issues and all others will be addressed during environmental reviews that will take place over the next year, he said.
If all goes according to Nestle’s plans, the plant would open in 2006. Said Palais: “We intend to be here a long time.”
