Kathy Tittle, Aurora del Val and Deanna Busdeiker talk to voters on primary election day May 17, 2016. (Photo: Karen Saró Troeger)
Blue yard signs bearing the words “Yes on 14-55: Our Water, Our Future” dotted lawns throughout Hood River County, Oregon, in the run-up to the primary election held on May 17. Just as many of these signs appeared to share a lawn with a Cruz or Trump yard sign as with a Clinton or Sanders sign.
The issue that brought conservatives and progressives together in this way was clear-cut: keeping Nestlé Waters North America from building a water bottling plant and extracting over 118 million gallons annually from a spring in a small, rural community 45 miles east of Portland.
“We needed to act. It was our moment.”
When Primary Day came, Oregon voters in Hood River County passed a first-of-its-kind ballot measure that bans the production and transportation of large-scale commercial bottled water within the county. The measure succeeded by an overwhelming majority of voters — 68.8 percent voted in favor — and effectively ended Nestlé’s attempts to operate within the community.
“We couldn’t have done it without bipartisan support,” said Julia DeGraw, the senior northwest organizer with Food and Water Watch, who has been working on this issue for the past seven years. “This is the definition of bipartisan support.”
The passage of the ballot initiative is a huge blow to Nestlé and comes at a time when the bottled water industry is coming under more and more scrutiny from the public as the nation experiences severe drought and increasing water scarcity.
“It Was Our Moment”
Since 2008, Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverage company, has attempted to make Cascade Locks, Oregon, the location of its first water extraction and bottling plant in the Northwest. Nestlé already taps into 50 springs across the United States but doesn’t currently have a source of spring water in the Pacific Northwest. As a result, in order to reach consumers in…