 Hello everyone. I am Becky Bartavix and I am a volunteer for the chapter and I don't think you can see me for some reason but anyway that doesn't matter. We can see you Becky. Oh you can okay there's a funny little thing in my screen. So I've been involved with Sierra Club for a long time. I live on what is known as North Haven Island which is in Pinox Stolen Pinox Scott Territory and I am so happy to introduce you to Nikki Sekara. She is just an incredible advocate for water justice in the state of Maine. She's the co-founder of Community Water Justice that's based in the Saco River watershed in Fryburn and she's Community Water Justice was formed in 2012 when Nestle Waters North America attempted to secure a U.S. precedent setting contract with the Fryburn Water Company that would have lasted up to 45 years for their Poland Springs brand bottled water. Her organization is focused on keeping stewardship of the water commons in the hands of the public and out of privatized corporate exploits to ensure a healthy environmental birthright for our future generations. Keep your eyes on Nikki on this. Nikki has been an educator in the fields of wilderness education and wilderness medicine for over 25 years. She spent eight years doing human rights advocacy on Capitol Hill. She served as a trustee on the water the Fryburn Water District is the founding board member of the Saco Headwaters Alliance. She's a member of the Sunlight Media Collective, a youth mentor and fostering leadership for the next generation. And she is the single mother of Luke Zechera who engages with her on work and he's actually been a volunteer on our political team and I am happy to introduce Nikki. Thank you. Thank you so much Becky for that introduction and thanks for hosting this talk. It's pretty serendipitous that during this time we're looking at a big transfer of water wealth as you may have already heard that the Poland Spring brand in Nestle waters North America was just purchased by a pair of private equity firms. But before I dive into that Oh Nikki you just got muted somehow. Okay where did I get cut off? About like 10 seconds ago. Okay so not very long. All right but however I'm just going to back up and give a little bit of historical context before I talk about the recent acquisition because I'm not sure where everybody's understanding is at as part of this call. So I think you can go to the slide number two. So here in Maine it's sometimes hard to see the global water crisis from our backyards. Maine we're very fortunate here in Maine to have copious amounts of water and it's so it's really hard for us to understand the crisis that's looming but to understand that you should note that the World Economic Forum says that water scarcity is one of the largest global risks in terms of potential impact over the next decade. An estimated 35% of the world's population lacks access to clean drinking water and by 2025 about 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity and two thirds of the world population could be living under water stressed conditions and again that's only four to five years away. So and another thing to think about is you know the global population on this earth has doubled since I was born in 1970 and may double again in much less time. And so this leads us to many questions and you know we're putting a price on our water, make it further inaccessible to only those can afford it and you know through the commodification and water and privatization there's a lot of inherent risks that come along with that so Maine is positioned in a period of time where we could change the course of this trajectory and so I think you can go to the next slide. Thank you. Slide number three. Does it not change on your screen here to get noted? A little delayed. Out here in Freiburg our connection can be a little wonky so yeah. So yeah. So why are privatizers like Nestle water looking at Maine and I think you know the reason that we have a lot of good clean water sources is an important one but we have sand and gravel aquifers that were left here from the last ice age which creates a great filtration system for freshwater sources. Our legal infrastructure here in Maine is out of date and it's easily take advantage of especially with you know corporations like Nestle or other corporate interests we see in our state house the lobbying power of certain industrial blocks are pretty impressive and that those voices can be really hard to overcome. Our proximity to global markets through our ports on the Atlantic Ocean is another reason and also the branding of Maine's pristine forest and waters that romanticizes through marketing creates an unparalleled appeal so all of these things make Maine favorable and open to exploits. Now Maine is approximately 35,000 square miles total and our sand and gravel aquifers occupy about 1300 square square miles of that total and our average annual recharge to those aquifers is about 240 billion gallons. Now that sounds like a lot of water but let's put something in the context here for perspective the Portland Water District which is Maine's largest public water supply serves 200,000 people total and businesses and they consume over 8.5 billion gallons annually and currently what Nestle takes is over a billion gallons but that equals about 850 gallons per person per year and the you know the significant thing about Nestle is they're removing that water from our local hydrological cycle and we don't have studies that have been done to educate us on the potential long-term impacts of the removal of that water from our hydrological cycle. Another thing to think about in this context is about 50% of precipitation in the state of Maine is runoff so it'll fill our lakes and streams and rivers and go out to the ocean 40% of that evaporates and only 10% or less infiltrates to recharge our groundwater so you know you can see like during times of drought the the removal from our hydrological cycle due to bulk water mining and exports can really exacerbate the effects of drought and we need to keep our eye on that. I'm curious you know did you some some questions to think for yourself I know because we're all muted right now and a lot of us don't have cameras but you know I'm curious like how many of us get our local tap water from a public water system or you know so the question to ask yourself is you know does your water come from a public water system or do you have a drilled well and out of those that might have their own well is it a drill or or dug well and so people with dug wells are more of a risk of going dry obviously especially in the areas where water is being extracted you can go to the next slide all right let me see here so Poland Spring as a company they were first a small water company that was started in 1859 by a family of proprietors based in Poland Maine they understood the quality of the water of the spring was exemplary due to the indigenous Abenaki's ancestral knowledge that they capitalized upon. In 1907 an upgraded state-of-the-art bottling facility produced 450 cases per day and was served to the elite in social circles of that time and then later in 1980 Perrier bought Poland Springs which was soon acquired by Nestle Waters in 1992 and since that time Nestle has grown their brand exponentially to three plastic bottling facilities in western Maine and that mines water from 10 different towns. The bottling facility in Hollis is boasted to be the second largest in the world which produces over 200,000 cases of 24 bottles you know the 16 ounce bottles per day from that one location alone. Nestle I think I'd mention exports over a billion gallons per year now from our aquifers and let's see let's quickly can you quickly switch to slide number 10 sorry about that yeah just to move forward on that so that here's a map and of the locations that Nestle mines and exports water from currently um let's see they are the towns of Poland, Freiburg, Kingfield, St. Albans, Pierce Pond Township, Dallas Plantation, Hollis, Denmark and most recently added in the past couple years is Rumford and Lincoln. Now Poland, Kingfield and Hollis currently have bottling plants and that before Nestle sold their their their brands to the private equity firms they were looking to build a forest bottling facility and in recent just this past year the Poland Spring brand has a sub brand called Poland Springs Origin that they just started marketing to the western state so it's a it's a water that can now be found in California so so they're really we're looking and pushing to expand the Poland Spring brand because it was it's the number one selling skew in all of metropolitan New York and it's their was their fastest growing brand most popular spring water brand okay let's see let's go back to um slide number five and many of you have heard about the Supreme Court case um you know we put Freiburg on the map a number of years ago and our community tried to block a U.S. precedent setting contract that would give the Nestle corporation the upper hand of control over our groundwater for the next 45 years um this was done without the consent of local people and because this contract honored an agreement between two private corporations the citizens ultimately had no say in this matter and we took the case all the way up to the Supreme Court and the biggest lesson we learned was that it was not within the purview of the main public utilities commission to consider environmental factors and considering contracts even in long-term contracts such as ours so that's a big hole that we have um in our regulatory process that won't consider these environmental impacts so and water bottling isn't the only water extractive business prospect that comes with concern I think that you know we're seeing other industries particularly agriculture in our food systems um you know it's been determined through United Nations that decentralizing our food systems is going to be the pathway forward to feeding ourselves in the future because of the impacts of centralizing our food systems and the amount of water consumption that it takes in the waste that happens and also shipping food all around the globe isn't sustainable so um we really need to focus on water conservation with the through the ways that we engage in agriculture in the local level and so and I know Becky and some other people here have been involved in you know the onland fish farms and the amount of fresh water from their from our aquifers that they consume so that's another potential impact that we need to be really concerned about and so you know what does water protection look like in your community you can go to number six really quick so in your community it might look like electing water conservationist to your local water district it could look like following waste regulations to protect your water sources it could look like adopting a local water ordinance or installing water bottle filling stations and public venues so we're not buying bottled water and here in Freiburg and other frontline communities fighting water privatization it might look just a little bit different so you can go to slide 11 so by privatizing water and sewer systems local government officials abdicate control over a vital public resource privatization limits public accountability multinational water corporations are primarily accountable to their stockholders not to the people they serve losing public input on how our water allocations will go will not ensure our future water security so now we can look at you know another growing competing interest I wanted to bring this up before we talk about this acquisition because how water privatization corporations interact each with each other is going to have a great impact on us in Maine so um see I'm for the people that are just listening in um right now I'm showing a map I'm sorry I should better catering to the people who don't have cameras on right now but I'm showing a map of the state of Maine which shows the 10 communities that Nestle takes water from and I'm also showing a map and those are in blue for the other people that can see in the communities that are in orange those are the communities where the main water company currently pulls water from so the main water company operates in more than 20 towns in the state of Maine and they have purchased municipal water systems so is there anybody if there's anybody on the call that's from a main water company town I'd be curious to know but main water company is actually not a main company at all they are part of Connecticut water company and they just went through a billions dollar merger with San Jose water company which has elevated them to the third largest private water utility in the United States they're on the New York Stock Exchange and they run water systems in let's see California and Texas and Florida and Connecticut and in Maine and this is another concern because as we saw with the contract between our local you know the Freiburg water company which is a privately run company and corporations like Nestle the townspeople didn't have any input into that deal so you know with with more private interest in our state our water sovereignty is going to be at risk because the potential of it being locked up through private deals to be shipped around the world is going to be an increasing problem so oops I just kicked my tea over I'll have to clean that up later let's see let's go to let's see let's start talking about one rock capital you can go to slide number 16 so on December 7th yeah go to yeah you got it so on December 7th 2020 for the first time in history water futures were being traded on the stock market this raises the alarms for many reasons because going you know towards water privatization on that level here in Maine we're at great risk because as you see with all of the prospects of water privatization we have in our state you know how future water allocations are going to go are going to depend on the stock market as opposed to genuinely conserving our water at the local level for local needs and as we all know shipping water around the world to solve local water problems is not a solution it's extremely unsustainable and it's going to funnel wealth up to the global elite and there's yeah for local agricultural purposes you know what we're going to be seeing in California now that water futures are being traded on the stock market is that agricultural interests are going to be at bidding wars potentially with outfits like bottled water companies to export water and I know a lot of our farmers here in Maine won't be able to afford to outbid corporations like Nestle so let's see and then in so on December 7th water was traded on stock market for the first time in history and then on February the second weekend in February Nestle announced that they were in negotiations with one rock capital in metropolis and company there were a pair of private equity firms and metropolis he's a billionaire he's a greek-american gentleman based in united states now and they just bought the playboy mansion that's kind of an interesting fact of who they are and they have bought and sold let's see hostess twinkies they buy failing brands and try to get them to perform again so a notable recent company that they bought and turned around was twinkies so they are of twinkie fame and also paps blue ribbon one rock capital they are an actual they're a group of corporations actually and they include plastic producers people connected with the oil industry chemical industries and also Mitsubishi Mitsubishi is a japanese corporation you've probably heard of their about you know their cars most notably but they also own the majority of shares of large privatized water systems in asia and africa so that's who they are now they are now doing business as blue triton brands and this is brand new information so their new corporate formation is blue triton so we're going to have to keep our name out for them in main so it's nestle waters north america metropolis and one rock capital partners doing businesses blue triton now what we don't know is how much like stock or investments nestle still has in this new corporate formation there was a blue triton representative that just gave a presentation out in colorado and when we were asking you know when people were asking pointed questions they were they were felt like they were really dodging them so there is a level of opaqueness to what their corporate structure actually is i did communicate with senator bennett who's been really helpful he's our new senator out here in district 19 and he has his own concerns and we've worked been working together a little bit to glean more information from this new corporate formation blue triton and some of the questions that we wrote to them about is let's see you know what corporate form is blue triton and under what jurisdiction is it organized who are the underlying owners of blue triton and who is the controlling party what business what is the business purpose of the acquisition and what is your exit strategy and what we mean by exit strategy you know when when private equity firms you know buy companies like this they really have a short runway you know from the time that they buy it from the time that they flip it to make money so we're interested also to hear what their exit strategy is during the time that they are taking ownership over our our water and in the transaction or any part of the transaction subject to regulatory approval at any level of government what assets relating to poll and spring were acquired in the transaction and what assets were if any were not acquired and with that question we were kind of concerned about you know whether all the land and the permits that go with the withdrawals would actually be held by Nestle because in original information that the companies were putting out it was stating that the private equity firms would be acquiring the offices and the the infrastructure and the brand name but it wasn't talking about the land and the permits at the time so you know will blue triton seek to change any contracts including those related to water sources or operations of interest to main communities and what kinds of changes might be expected who are the principal officers of blue triton and i'll get to that in a minute because just yesterday afternoon i did get a little bit more information about that and let's see so yeah anyway we have a host of questions and we're thankful for senator Bennett for helping us with these questions and reaching out to them directly because they're more likely they're more apt to listen ask you know respond to a senator than they are community groups with concerns so he'll keep working on us with that you can go to slide number 17 thank you so this was pulled off of this image is um it has two columns you know on the left we see nestle waters north america and on the right we see blue triton brands and then a list of um you know cfos and vps listed underneath and so as you'll see between you know just these positions um there's very little change except you know the chairman obviously is no longer steve pressley it's going to be dean metropolis so he's going to be the chairman and interim ceo of blue triton brands but here i think they're trying to create the appearance says there's very little change in their structure um but you know there this doesn't really explain um you know what portion that nestle might still have control over i can say that back in 2018 in brazil nestle did a similar thing where because of public pressure mounting against nestle it was damning damaging their public image so they sold to a company but maintained a majority of control over that so to them it was a strategy of changing the face of their business um so another company could do the bidding for them and look like the bad guy when in actuality nestle's investments still kept them in control so when we talk about blue triton i'm still going to be talking about nestle slash blue triton because they're in there but we just don't know to what level yet it's not clear so um let's see you can go to slide 18 really quickly so as we're trying to figure out this new corporate formation you know they give us a diagram like this which really doesn't answer all of our questions um so as you can see um they have again nestle listed on the left and blue triton on the right and it's just it's not really telling us um who the actual investors are because as you may or may not understand private equity firms has a lot of corporate stakeholders within those firms and so we don't know you know where nestle might still be at in all of this um because that could also depending on you know their their stake that they're still maintaining with this new corporate formation um might give us a clue as to who might be buying this corporation next so you know nestle um claimed that they were selling it due to their brands weren't performing as they needed them to but we also know that nestle's taken some huge hits within their you know public relations due to lawsuits over their groundwater extraction um due to the plastic pollution that they create as you may have heard you know for three years in a row they were listed as one of the top plastic polluters in the globe and that's really harmed their reputation so you know some people are thinking maybe that this is just a ploy to um try to you know get their image back in a place where it needs to be while making their water brands more profitable and you know metropolis and company is notorious for doing that is squeezing profits from um you know less performing brands so I think with that we can expect to see here let me pull up um was doing some research the other day on this but I think we can expect to see them um doing layoffs I know with the hostess you know twinkies brand they laid off gosh they had over 8 000 employees total and they laid off everybody except for 1200 employees um that's a huge jump I know in main nestle they they employ about between 800 and 900 people they say um I've never been able to get a list of what that those employment numbers actually look like and where the jobs are within that 800 to 900 I know that includes like seasonal and part-time employees and also a lot of their truck drivers aren't from the state of Maine at all it includes their you know senior executives who aren't even in Maine but um it'll be interesting to see how that will affect the job numbers um since they're looking to make things more profitable and also bottled water is one of the most automated industries that exist and you know as far as the amount of resources they're extracting from us they give us very little in the way of jobs in return um and there's I know technology has gotten it has been quote unquote improved since the times that they've built their bottling plants in Maine and so you know with new technologies put in it they'll probably need fewer workers I would imagine all right where are we for time okay I think um okay you can go to slide 19 and some of you may have heard about um nestle being sued uh there's a current legal case against nestle for fraudulent labeling of their pole and spring brand um and the case was brought forth by five individuals in a class action lawsuit and they're claiming that it's not spring water at all they're claiming that the water is comes from a drilled well nearby the spring site and here in Freiburg I do know that to be true um but somehow they've been able to get around the definition of spring water here in the state and that's really interesting because um well I'm right now also I'm showing a photo of evergreen spring that's in Freiburg Maine and for those of you that can see the picture you can see the pump house the little stone building that's nearby and you can see the spring which you know it's that's not a natural spring as you can tell because it's built up surrounding some water that's coming to the surface but in the lawsuit it claims that that spring doesn't naturally exist and it wasn't found on maps prior to them being here and um so it's claiming that it's the this whole photograph that you're seeing that that spring in the foreground is actually a fraudulent claim um let's see you can go to slide 20 so in the lawsuit and as we know you know Maine's regulatory system is compromised due to many conflicts of interest uh Nestle has what we call regulatory capture in the state of Maine where they've gained positions on our board of environmental protection they've gained a position on the Maine drinking water program and also the Maine public utilities commission when they were overseeing our supreme court case at the state level and as you know we were going through the process with the Maine public utilities commission of of um approving the 45-year contract all of the commissioners all three of them had ties to Nestle including the public advocate in in the utilities commission office so and it took us over a year and a half to get them to all recuse themselves from our case because they all had ties to Nestle now um so the public relies on our state regulatory officials to ensure compliance with the standard of the identity for spring water and while Maine's governing statute has adopted FDA spring water identity standards Maine has established a regulatory structure designed to ensure compliance with it but Maine has not properly enforced compliance against Nestle waters the state's failure to do so has resulted in a large measure because Nestle has manipulated and compromised Maine's regulatory process and I got this information from the actual lawsuit that's stating all of this so Maine's bottled water industry is regulated by several agencies including the DEP the Department of Agriculture and Conservation and the Department of Health and Human Services and so that and the Health and Human Services includes Maine drinking water program. Groundwater extraction permits and unorganized or de-organized townships and plantations such as you know Pierce Pond Township and Dallas Plantation they are unorganized they have been granted by LERC which is the the land use regulation commission prior to 2012 and since 2012 the land use planning commission gives authors permission and then you know with respect to organized townships such as you know Hollis and Denmark and Kingfield they go through the DEP or by the DHHS which acts upon the recommendation of the drinking water program staff so since 2005 these agencies have cooperated to eliminate redundancies in their regulatory responsibility by allocating certain responsibilities exclusively to one agency pursuant to that scheme responsibility for evaluating compliance with the spring water identity standard lies exclusively with the drinking water program whose environmental engineers hydrologists and staff members are alone responsible for ensuring compliance with the spring water identity standard in Maine so I think that really tells a story you know with them being sued and going to the main drinking water program that's allowed that standard and as some of you may know Thomas Brennan he is the Nestle Waters North America senior resource manager that sat on the main drinking water program for for many years and interesting enough I just discovered that he just took a job with American aquaculture whose proposing huge fish farms in Frenchman's Bay which is seeing a lot of resistance because of the complications and the environmental impacts that those type of fish farms create um anyway let's see we're running out of time so quickly you can go to slide 21 and I want to leave you with what you can do and so this is a list I'll read them for the people that are listening in you know first and foremost we can limit our consumption of bottled water you know we can use water filters and refills in its place run from municipal office that's really important because we need as many people who are concerned about our water sources and protecting them appropriately we need them to step up and take positions of power you can serve on your local water district interesting enough I did some research a few years back and on average there's between three and five open positions on most municipalities in the state of Maine so whether it's a select person or um there's positions like on the planning board you could take up or conservation committee commissions um a lot of conservation committees in the state of Maine in municipalities have gone inactive I've noticed so look and if you don't have a conservation committee see if one there's infrastructure for one to exist and we had a group of people here in Freiburg um just revive ours a few years ago and that's super helpful to have them active and part of our local government you can adopt a local water protection ordinance super important if um you don't know if your town has a water protection ordinance go to the town office and ask for it it should be posted on your town website but often I find that they don't exist there so you can call your town office and check it out and see what um your local protections look like the town of Shapley you can refer to their um town ordinance but they've adopted a really strong model ordinance that you can look at you can also email me and we can have talks about what a good protection ordinance can look like for your community um definitely pressure our elected officials to maintain public stewardship and not to commodify or privatize Maine water so it's really important that we all engage our elected officials on this do it often because we need to really make more noise about this growing problem um support progressive water policies for future generations we we did have a bill going in this session but it unfortunately came back from the revisers office not in the spirit of the bill that we were intended which raises a lot of questions about why the revisers office would not give would um not give us protections against private water utilities so I think that their revision raises more questions than confidence and so uh we'll hopefully be investigating that in the next the next month or so um yeah and also question institutions and organizations with conflicts of interest Nestle has a lot of power they're not I don't see that they're leaving our state but they have a lot of investments in research um with the University of Maine and the University of New England University of Southern Maine uh it's really interesting to see how um they are shaping this our our science base in the state of Maine and with the amount of money that they give and the amount that they have their hands in uh you know hydrological studies in the state of Maine it has the appearance that they have scientific capture in the state so we really need to question that um but let me stop there and open it up for questions because I could go on and on about this but uh I'm more interested in how your questions might guide conversation from here thank you thanks Nikki um there were I there are a lot of questions in or a few questions in the chat okay but I had one just recently mentioned um you know the language of the bill was changed in the revised revised your office is there a bill number and yeah let me actually we decided to kill the bill okay and so the bill was it would limit any um any utility any uh water system utility from engaging in a permit for bulk water extraction exports it limit them to a five-year maximum permit okay so right um you know if the reason why Nestle got away with being able to secure a 45-year contract which is irresponsible um we wanted to limit that to a maximum of five years which is competent and reasonable actually personally I don't think it should be over two years maybe one but I had to think like through the state's perspective what they're gonna think competent and reasonable and because comprehensive plans also go on five-year cycles and and updating and renewing everything you know I would advocate personally for like a two-year maximum but maximum and I'm thinking that this 45-year contract is really an anchor for hedge funders right so when you're selling water futures you need something like that to anchor investments and to attract investments and so we have to stop playing their game with our water in that way because over the central part of our aquifer we also have a land holding company for Bank of America um that abuts the property that Nestle owns so and to give you a snapshot um so Nestle owns about 20 000 acres across the U.S. and that's what gives them access um you know to to um the rights to the water in a lot of places or it gives them a little conservation easement to protect their future profits um so 6 000 of those 20 000 acres are in the state of Maine and 3 000 of those 6 000s are in the Soco River watershed alone so it kind of tells a story about where they're really focusing on and I had heard uh Kim Jeff Kim Jeffries who is the CEO of Nestle Waters North America a number of years ago I heard him giving a radio interview and he was talking about how he was going to manage the white mountain the the white mountain watershed the the watershed in the white mountains here so they have their sights on Maine you know Nestle or Blue Triton they have a hundred-year plan for Maine or Nestle more than Blue Triton because they're going to flip it but but Maine doesn't have a hundred-year plan for Maine you know we are woefully very caught with our pants down so to speak it's it's really sad yeah I think Mary Ann had her hand up can you can you be unmuted can you unmute I'm unmuted okay uh one question was yeah will the Pine Tree amendment help us fighting Nestle's I would love to think that it does and I love the spirit of the Pine Tree amendment um my concern is that because you know because this gives us the you know the human right to clean air clean water and a healthy existence super important and it's valuable and I can't wait to see where that might have its place in helping us advance our environmental goals in the state of Maine one thing that concerns me about it is because money is speech and corporations are currently people that would that doesn't give us protections in the way I think we would hope them to uh so I'm concerned I have concerns about that because the only way that to give it legal legs I think is to give rights natures to it to exist currently nature does not have rights to exist in our constitution and our whole economy all of our health is tied to that and so we're really shooting ourselves in the foot without making it a nature centric piece not to say that the green amendment might be helpful and I hope that it will and regardless I think it's a step in the right direction of acknowledging that and of course you know big changes don't happen overnight and so while I love the work that's being done on that I think it's important because it stimulates conversations that are critical I'm just you know I'm just very interested to see how that might give us some a legal basis to correct our course so to speak the states need more legal rights over the resources of the state you know across the country you mean on a more localized basis I mean that nationally states don't have much control over corporations who want to extract oil or what or water or whatever right so yeah no they definitely have protections that and hopefully um there is an investigation into the bottled water industry that the house committee on oversight and reform had started prior to the pandemic happening and so last march I was supposed to go and testify in front of congress to you know my experiences and what we're seeing in Maine with the bottled water industry and unfortunately they canceled just a few days before the hearing because the government shut down and so right now we're trying to get them to resume that investigation and so you know things are pretty busy still with the pandemic and it's we've been pushing pushing pushing but um yeah um you know Rashida Tlaib you may have heard of her she's really great she represents Michigan and the problems they've having there but we've been in close contact with with her about resuming this and other committee members but yeah so there's thank you um there is a question from Bonnie um Bonnie do you want to ask it or do you want me to ask it you can unmute yourself can unmute myself uh I just we moved to Maine half a year ago from San Bernardino County California where Arrowhead Nestle's Arrowhead was um and we were in extreme drought conditions in Southern California when we left and we arrived in Maine and discovered that the Maine was in drought conditions too and I was just wondering um I mean Arrowhead was taking water illegally and was causing uh all the towns in the area uh which is on a mountain to not have enough water for their population does the Nestle does this extraction have anything to do with the drought conditions in Maine I mean since we've been here we've seen rainfall and the water all over the place so yeah what is causing that yeah well I'm glad that you're asking that question I was just on the phone with my friends in San Bernardino yesterday yeah well welcome to Maine and thank you yeah this issue hasn't gone away from you and I'm sorry about that yeah um but I I also have the connection that my parents used to live in Denmark and my kids went to Freiburg Academy somewhere along the line so oh great and my son is exactly your age so you might have I don't know anyway oh very cool but that's beside the point no that's awesome um well actually if you want to pop up slide eight yeah um so San Bernardino is awesome they just sent a cease and desist order to Nestle because they'd been pulling illegally out of um the national forest there for so long they didn't even have a right to be there no finally after years and years and years they're getting the boot and they had the legal basis to do so and I think because you know Nestle is you know selling off their water brands it just created an opportunity for this conversation to happen to finally kick them to the curb so they could be successful in this but you know we're we're looking at probably a few year long battle uh legally anyway with that so um we just put up a picture of Round Pond now Round Pond is over the central part of our aquifer here in Maine and this is you know taken on a summer day uh you know I got it from Google Maps it's just a screenshot from Google Maps and you can see how the water line you can see how it's shallow along the edges but you can see where the water line is and it goes almost up to the tree line right and can you show then the next slide so here's Round Pond right now so the top photo is taken on April 9th and um oops that says text air and um yeah you can see that um because we've had poor snowpack this past winter um you can see that the water line is very very low um I had wanted to get a drone shot of this but because this pond is close to a small airstrip it would be illegal for us to fly a drone to do a direct comparison from that last image but there's places around this pond now that are 40 feet um of of exposed shoreline from the water line so so and you can see in the second photo that's a measuring marker that's used to collect water level water level data and it's fully exposed it's not even in the water anymore so um our local like Luigi geological services from Freeport Maine they're an independent hydrogeologic consulting firm they've been contracted by Nestle waters to collect and compile hydraulic data for the wardsbrook aquifer here in Freiburg but the data that they collect from Round Pond isn't included and so they've gotten away without including the data and you can see the impacts on this pond and they haven't been up to normal levels except maybe during the flood stage from a very short period but these photos are here are from our flood stage here this year and I've never seen them that low and I go to this pond somewhat frequently because it is an indicator it's a spring fed pond right over the central part of our aquifer so it tells a story um so we're keeping our eyes on this so the impacts of drought you know like I said to localize regions where they take water from there can be exacerbated impacts but for us to prove that it's Nestle doing it we have to come up with a science so the burden of proof is on the land owners and not Nestle to prove that it has anything to do with their pumping but nobody's recalled it ever being that low ever you know prior to pumping especially so you know only local stories can that's not scientific data so you know that's what we're looking at here locally and I know that in Denmark too during the drought of 2016 there were a lot of wells that gone dry including farmers wells who traditionally never gone dry even during drought but again you know these small farmers they can't afford to go up against Nestle and along the shores of one of the ponds in Freiberg was showing a lot of signs of impact and it was interesting that Nestle purchased the land where all the impact became obvious um during that same time frame you know we can't say whether it was due to that or not but a lot of townspeople were noticing and complaining and then the land changed hands all of a sudden so where you know it's that's unclear as to yeah so there's there's a lot more questions that come up with this than anything so does anybody want to raise your hand or have another does anybody have any other questions I think this is just a remarkable piece of research that you've done Nikki and I just can't thank you enough for this work uh we as a you know as a chapter in nationally Sierra Club opposes using bottled water but we clearly have to get more active in the state of Maine and I seems that there needs to be a conversation with the revisers office about how they could have revised your bill to to change it so dramatically um that's really yeah so um that's an you know an interesting twist um yeah it is right because it came back saying that that would only be imposed on consumer owned utilities as though they wanted to protect the privately run utilities for some reason and ooh that's that's really interesting and that's something that we really need to examine so right yeah that's that's usually problem we have a lot of work to do I keep I always think about the you know Native American you know meme that when you're drinking water you're drinking water that has passed through all the generations of all of the animals and plants and people that have gone before us since there's only always been one percent of potable water in the world um it's remarkable that we take so little care of it so I think the work that you're doing is incredible and I hope we can support you in whatever way we can um well we'll be putting that bill in again for sure and maybe we can make it an emergency bill for the second half of the session you know that yeah if you're willing to do that we can we can certainly talk about doing that um anybody else who on the on the call who'd like to join in um in encouraging us to do that please please feel free to join us so um and Nikki do you want to put your I don't have your email address up front what's your email address well uh you can contact me at waterjusticeoneatgmail.com okay yep waterjusticeone at gmail okay great well thanks everybody um I actually have a hard stop right now um so I'm gonna have to go but I just want to thank you so much Nikki and this is recorded so if any of you want to look at it again uh feel free to uh go on our website I uh maybe Anya can tell you how to find it and I thank you and I have to go okay thank you so much hope to see you all before long