Michigan OKs Nestlé Water Extraction, Despite 80K+ Public Comments Against It 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Steven M. Herppich /AFP/Getty Images Steven M. Herppich /AFP/Getty Images 
 
 In a much-watched case, a Michigan agency has approved Nestlé's plan to boost the amount of water it takes from the state. The request attracted a record number of public comments — with 80,945 against and 75 in favor. 
 
 Nestlé's request to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to pump 576,000 gallons of water each day from the White Pine Springs well in the Great Lakes Basin was "highly controversial," member station Michigan Radio reports. But despite deep public opposition, the agency concluded that the company's plan met with legal standards. 
 
 "It is very clear this permit decision is of great interest to not only residents in the surrounding counties, but to Michiganders across the state as well," MDEQ Director C. Heidi Grether said in approving the permit. 
 
 "In full transparency, the majority of the public comments were in opposition of the permit," Grether added, "but most of them related to issues of public policy which are not, and should not be, part of an administrative permit decision." 
 
 Under the plan, Nestlé will be approved to pump up to 400 gallons of water per minute from the well, rather than the 250 gallons per minute it had been extracting. The company first applied for the new permit in July 2016. 
 
 "The state says Nestlé has to complete a monitoring plan and submit it to the DEQ for approval," MR reports of the 58-page final memo from the Michigan agency. 
 
 Water is a complicated and sore subject in many areas, but in few places more so than in Michigan, where a crisis has raged for years over high levels of lead and other dangerous heavy metals in the water in Flint. And back in 2014, Detroit resorted to shutting off water to thousands of customers as it fought bankruptcy. 
 
 With that recent history as a backdrop, Nestlé's plan to boost the amount of water it takes from the Great Lakes State drew attention and added another dimension to a debate over whether water should be seen as a commodity, a commercial product — or a human right. 
 
 Nestlé's well is in western Michigan, near the town of Evart, as Michigan Radio's Lindsey Smith reported on The Environment Report podcast. The company bottles the water for sale under its Ice Mountain label. 
 
 To get through the massive and unprecedented public response for comment, Smith said, the state's environmental quality department created categories of responses, after reading several thousand of them. The resulting themes dealt with a range of ideas, from the potential environmental damage of the water plan to calls for a public vote on the increase. 
 
 "The interesting thing to me," Smith said, "was the top three themes — by far — are: [one,] corporate greed versus people and the environment; two, water is not for profit; and three, worries about privatizing water." 
 
 Smith added, "about 40,000 people wrote about each of those concerns." 
 
 Even with those comments taken into consideration, the Michigan agency was still bound to make its final determination on the legal merits of Nestlé's request. 
 
 "And that's the end of it," the agency's source water supervisor, Matt Gamble, told Smith last month. "We don't have the power to say no arbitrarily. We can't just say no for reasons that aren't attached to the law." 
 
 The agency can't say no, Smith added, "even if the vast majority of the public wants them to." ||||| Bottled water is packaged for shipment at the Nestle Water bottling plant in Stanwood, Michigan, January 11, 2018. Global food conglomerate Nestle is in a battle with critics in tiny Osceola Township, Michigan where residents complain the Swiss company's water extraction techniques are ruining the environment. STEVEN M. HERPPICH/AFP/Getty Images (Photo: STEVEN M. HERPPICH, STEVEN M. HERPPICH/AFP/Getty Ima) 
 
 The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality approved a controversial permit Monday for Nestlé Waters North America to increase the amount of water it withdraws from the state’s groundwater table from 250 gallons a minute to 400 gallons. 
 
 Despite vehement opposition to the permit from residents in Osceola County, where the Nestle well is located, and water activists across the state, the DEQ said the permit met the requirements of the Michigan Safe Drinking Water Act. 
 
 “The scope and detail of the department’s review of the Nestlé permit application represents the most extensive analysis of any water withdrawal in Michigan history,” said C. Heidi Grether, director of the state DEQ, in a statement. “We are hopeful that whether residents agree with the Nestlé permitting decision or not, they will acknowledge and respect the work that MDEQ staff did to thoroughly and conscientiously apply the law in reviewing the permit.” 
 
 Arlene Anderson-Vincent, natural resources manager at the Ice Mountain Natural Spring Water plant in Stanwood, said they were still reviewing the terms of the permit. 
 
 “We will need time to carefully review the specifics, but will comply with all permit requirements," she said in a statement. "We appreciate the MDEQ’s careful review and consideration of our application, in what it has called its most thorough review ever, and we look forward to providing them with the monitoring plans as required.” 
 
 More: 'Tapping the Great Lakes' documentary on protecting water supply debuts Monday 
 
 More: Judge: Michigan township must issue Nestle a water pumping permit 
 
 James Clift, the policy director for the Michigan Environmental Council, said the permit is a mixed bag, with unprecedented additional monitoring and oversight requirements for Nestlé. 
 
 “But we wanted to see some improvement projects brought to the table by Nestlé,” he said. “I don’t see that in the permit and I’m disappointed.” 
 
 State Sen. Rebekah Warren, D-Ann Arbor, who serves on the Senate's Natural Resources Committee, said she was deeply disappointed by the DEQ's approval of the permit. 
 
 "Michiganders know that no private company should be able to generate profits by undermining our state's precious natural resources, which is why an unprecedented number of people spoke up to oppose this permit," she said. "Out of 81,862 comments filed by the people of our state, only 75 of them were in favor of the permit." 
 
 And Lisa Wozniak, executive director of the Michigan League of Conservation Voters, said the DEQ decision represented a fundamental failure of the agency to protect Michigan's water. 
 
 "Sadly, the DEQ chose to give the green light to a foreign company to continue pumping Michigan water virtually unchecked, hanging a ‘For Sale’ sign on Michigan’s abundant water resources," she said. 
 
 Once the monitoring plan is in place and a baseline of data is collected, Nestlé can begin withdrawing the increased amount of water from the White Pine Springs well located near Evart. 
 
 Nestle is planning to significantly increase the amount of Michigan groundwater it pumps from under the state. (Photo: Nestle Waters NA) 
 
 The water withdrawal increase will feed a $36-million expansion of Nestlé’s Ice Mountain bottled water facility in Stanwood. The state's Water Withdrawal Assessment Tool initially rejected the proposal, saying it would cause adverse impacts to nearby streams and fish. But the company appealed and DEQ approved the permit request. 
 
 Much of the public outrage was generated by the fact that Nestlé gets the groundwater for nothing more than a $200 per year DEQ permit. And that won’t change under the new permit. 
 
 Clift said about 3,000 high capacity wells have registered with the state. They withdraw at least 100,000 gallons of water a day. Most of them are farmers who are using the water to irrigate their fields. No one pays for the water, only the permit to withdraw the resource. 
 
 “We’re underfunding our agencies that are designed to protect public health,” he said. “This water quality program is woefully underfunded. This program needs more funding and we think the Legislature needs to address that.” 
 
 Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation sued Nestlé in 2001 over the potential damage to lakes, rivers and streams that its bottled water plant's groundwater withdrawals could cause. After years of court battles, the two sides reached a settlement in 2009, reducing Nestlé's siphoning to 218 gallons per minute from 400, with additional restrictions on spring and summer withdrawals. 
 
 The Nestlé expansion also was opposed by Osceola Township, which rejected a permit request for the pumping station at the water plant. That rejection was overturned by both county and state Appeals Courts. 
 
 Contact Kathleen Gray: 313-223-4430, kgray99@freepress.com or on Twitter @michpoligal. 
 
 Nestlé is under fire in Canada after the bottled water company outbid a small town aiming to secure a long-term water supply, according to local reports. (Photo: Siri Stafford, Getty Images) 
 
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 One thousand, four hundred and forty days. As of Tuesday, it has been 1,440 days since the residents of Flint, Mich., have had clean, safe water traveling through their pipes. In exactly three weeks, we will hit the four-year mark since the lead-contaminated-water crisis started. As of today, residents are still being told to use water filters or bottled water for their needs. 
 
 While the water may no longer be coming out of the Flint River, it is still not completely safe in homes and throughout the city—including in the Flint Community Schools. 
 
 MLive reports that what is expected to be the last round of state-sponsored testing for lead in water in school buildings was conducted last month, and according to the results published by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, more than 4 percent of the water samples collected had elevated levels of lead. 
 
 At the same time, the state will soon decide whether to continue free bottled-water distribution throughout the city of Flint. 
 
 Fortunately, Flint Community Schools has separate agreements with companies to cover the supply of bottled water for its campuses through the end of the school year. 
 
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 The state is doing a review of the overall quality of the water in Flint, and that will help it decide whether to continue the water-distribution program currently in place. 
 
 While each of the 10 buildings in the school district had at least one instance of water with at least 15 parts per billion of lead, one elementary school has continued to register high at multiple test sites—including three samples that registered at more than 100 ppb of lead, which is more than six times the federal action limit. 
 
 Flint Mayor Karen Weaver believes that the bottled-water distribution should be continued until all lead and galvanized service lines have been removed in the city, something MLive reports could take the next two construction seasons to complete. 
 
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 According to a previous report by MLive, the state spends an average of $22,000 per day providing bottled-water delivery in the city of Flint.
– Michigan has given the OK to Nestle's controversial request to increase the amount of water it pumps from the state—despite the fact that a record number of public comments were made on the matter, and 80,945 of those comments were against the plan. Just 75 were in favor. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality found that the plan, which will see Nestle pumping up to 400 gallons of water per minute from the White Pine Springs well in the Great Lakes basin instead of the 250 gallons per minute it currently extracts, complied with legal standards, NPR reports. Most of the public comments opposing the plan "related to issues of public policy which are not, and should not be, part of an administrative permit decision," the director of the agency said when approving Nestle's permit. Water is a particularly tender subject in Michigan, where Detroit once shut off water to thousands of customers who were behind on paying their water bills—and where the water in Flint, four years later, still isn't safe to drink. Nestle extracts the water to bottle it for sale under its Ice Mountain label, and all it costs the company is a $200-per-year permit from the DEQ—an amount that won't change under the new permit, the Detroit Free Press reports. Per a Michigan Radio journalist, the top three themes of public comments opposing Nestle's plan were "corporate greed versus people and the environment," "water is not for profit," and "worries about privatizing water." The policy director for the Michigan Environmental Council says that while the new permit includes additional monitoring and oversight requirements, it does not include any "improvement projects brought to the table by Nestle."