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Don't sell your soul, Oregon. Just another capitalistic scheme for a corporation on the other side of the country to fatten its wallets at the expense of Oregon's natural resources and citizens. We already pay a good sum for our clean water supply and shouldn't allow a big corporation to steal it and sell it to deceived people everywhere while at the same time causing permanent damage to the planet in the form of pollution. The bottled water industry in this country is an absolute farce when you consider that children in many parts of the world are dying before the age of five due to truly unacceptable drinking water conditions. The water that comes from the tap in american homes is perfectly safe and acceptable and we need to stop being deceived and fattening the wallets of greedy corporations who do not care about the well-being of Oregonians. We have already allowed coal mining and chemical weapons to stain our landscape and it is time we said enough is enough.
Bottled water is simply tap water with a fancy name. For most brands of bottled water, the taste is distinguishable from the tap, and there are no significant health benefits of bottled versus tap water. Bottled water may even be LESS healthy for you to drink. An industrial project to supply increasingly money-strapped consumers with a product they don't need, in the beautiful Gorge, makes no sense. The results of this poll so far send a clear message: keep the bottled water industry OUT of the Gorge!
I live in Portland and travel to and stop in Cascade Locks to eat, shop, enjoy the peace and beauty whenever I go to hike in the Gorge. People need a way to earn a living. A sustainable living. One that will not steal from their children and grandchildren, the legacy that is promised to them by a moral people. We do not sell what is not ours to sell. Fresh, clean, pure water is the birthright of everyone in this country. No one, no matter what the law says, has the moral right to sell the water in the first place(to Nestle or anyone else). And even less so to then resell the water, charging people for the convenience---the deadly convenience---of having it in a lethal plastic bottle, which, as has been pointed out, costs us all in several ways all leading to killing of all our natural resources ultimately.
The people of Cascade Locks need to join together, ask others for help, in creating a positive, sustainable alternative to selling off their children and grandchildren's future. The people of Cascade Locks are resourceful, intelligent and a true community. As such, they can work together to create a good solution to the need for work(which, as has been said, is an illusion under the proposed Nestle plan).
www.thinkoutsidethebottle.org
We should not allow anyone to bottle our water. Everyone should filter their water at home and bottle it in glass or steel. If this is not possible use a drinking fountain. Fresh clean, pure water to drink is everyone's basic natural right. No one should have to pay for it or worse drink from potentially toxic plastic bottles.
Doesn't Nestle have enough fresh water in the Swiss Alps anyway?
Dear Nestle,
Bottling Water in LEED Plant is not green, bottle water is the antithesis of what the worlds needs to do to ensure sustainable co-existence with our shared natural resources. Saying that you are committed to using less plastic in your plastic bottle and building an energy efficient building is not the issue.
A subdivision built in a deer and elk migratory corridor using low flush toilets and green building materials still destroys the function of the habitat.
The same goes for a building that uses less energy that it otherwise would use.
The issue for ODFW is whether there is any chance that the water from the ground will either now or IN THE FUTURE be of less quality for the fisheries they seek to recover.
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife currently uses the water and then it returns to the COLUMBIA RIVER via a flowing water course.
The water is NOT bottled by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and then moved out of the State of Oregon.
The issue of water rights for Oregonians is whether we will allow the expropriation of our public good for a fraction of the cost to a large out of state multinational corporation.
Water bottling requires fossil fuels to package and ship around the world.
Portland, Hood River and many places in Oregon use gravity and pipes to get their water.
To be green sustaianable and show that you care about the world's natural resources Nestle, you need to find ways to secure the worlds water supplies, not turn it into a scarce commidity that you can sell for large multiples of its initial cost to you.
William Clark
The Columbia River Gorge
People on this blog should know that our City Administrator has asked for a payment of $5,000 if he lands the Nestle contract. This is ethically reprehensible. He is a waste of the taxpayer's money for his West Point education. Go ahead, call our city hall, 541-374-8484 or e-mail him bseeger@cascade-locks.or.us. and tell him what your think of his less thatn ethical conduct.
You are so right. Some of the citizens in town are very discouraged with the only solutions that they can come up with are big, polluting corporate solutions. I have been calling for a commission or committee or just a citizen's group to begin to come up with tourism enhancers and somehow to begin to draw small shops, art-based businesses and other commercial entities. We sit in the middle of a national treasure.
Part of the problem is that the one economic promotion agent that we currently have, the Port. Yet, the Port is the promoter of the casino as the answer to our problems, and have been doing that for over ten years. In that time, nothing and nobody else has been done to help draw recovery to our small town.
i also wonder what in the world is so wrong with being a small town with great views, mostly retirees and tourists during the season.
The argument is that this bottling plant will help the economy of the area. So would a paper mill, oil refinery or a coal burning electric plant. Isn’t time we said enough to short term, at any cost fixes and focused on sustainable development?
As others have said, bottled water is less pure than most city water and produces enormous amount of plastic trash. Why would we even consider allowing such a travesty? Have we learned nothing of short term unsustainable fixes?
There are towns within the Gorge that are low on water. We don't need to give away our water for a very few jobs that pay minimum wage. The impacts would be huge. I don't understand why the City & Port have to go for huge developments such as Nestle and a Casino. If Nestle, the Casino and their Hotel are built how much water will be left for the town? The truck and auto traffic would be horrendous.
Steal the water, wrap it in plastic for one time use, take no responsibility for the creation of literal tons of plastic waste which then ends up in the landfill, oceans, rivers,plus add diesel belching trucks to haul our water to world...and people have a problem with that? Are you nuts, think of the dollars it will bring to our economy! I mean water export is the next big thing and we'd be right there on the cutting edge. And we're going to need those dollars to handle all the waste too. Let them build...it's progress isn't it. And they've got some really cool ads too. N.E.S.T.L.E.S....
Exactly, there is no gaurantee these jobs will go to locals, and, ideally, industrial areas do not exactly belong in this area. Cascade Locks should remain a sleepy little town as it has for decades. As far as the trucks, imagine the extension of the line of truckers backed up in Troutdale, this would then need to expand also for winter road blocks. This area is hectic enough in winter. Think about it..its just another way for the big corporations to get their foot into the gorge so they can tear it up some more!
Just what we need -- A megacorporation (Nestle) sucking up another of Oregon's precious resources, virtually for free, then marketing it in containers that after a single use by ignorant consumers will litter our highways and roadside with more plastic garbage.
So we must allow Nestle to appropriate our water so they can sell it back to us in a plastic shell for a huge profit? I don't think so. And the bottling plant would generate some 45 grunt labor jobs? Ooooo! I'm so impressed. That will really turn the local economy around in a hurry.
Well, they want to place the plant on the site of Hood River Sand and Gravel. That's down the (aptly named) Gravel Pit Road. The plan is to build a frontage road leading east to the Port industrial Land.
The problem comes with getting the trucks from there to the weigh station, and with the trucks going straight through our downtown to get to W/B 84. Include that if the casino comes, and the new interchange is built to handle the traffic, the interchange that carries all westbound traffic into downtown will be closed. That isolates the downtown and we might as well close up and become a wide space on the side of the highway.
There is also no guarantee that those 48 jobs go to citizens of Cascade Locks. People will apply from Stevenson, Gresham and Hood River for the jobs. The hatchery is a very important one, it is raising endangered trout. One thing is sure: we need to be very, very sure this is right for us, and for the Scenic area.
I grew up in the Gorge, went to school at Cascade Locks, and was there when the town was bypassed by the I-80 freeway, which knocked the economic basis right out from under the town. The Nestle proposal should be carefully scrutinized, and if it's as good as it sounds the city council should back it wholeheartedly. The question about truck traffic through downtown could be solved with a direct link from the bottling plant to the freeway if the location of the plant allows it. The town definitely needs this economic boost.