SALIDA — Plans by Nestle to draw and ship spring water from along the Arkansas River for its bottled water business have touched off an intense debate in Chaffee County.
The county is considering whether to issue a land-use permit to Nestle Waters North America. The company owns land and water rights near Nathrop, north of Salida, and says it will invest $15 million to withdraw 65 million gallons of water a year from springs and build a pipeline to ship it to a bottling plant in Denver.
Nestle has an agreement with Aurora for the city to release 200 acre- feet a year from an upper reservoir to make up for the water it would remove from the Arkansas basin.
An acre-foot of water is roughly 326,000 gallons, a year’s supply for two families. Opponents worry about the long-term effects on the area.
“I think they could buy and dry our valley,” said Vicki Klein of Chaffee Citizens for Sustainability, a group formed to fight the project. “Two hundred acre-feet might not be a huge amount initially, but where they can go from there is frightening.”
Nestle is looking at drawing water in three or four more locations in the state. The Chaffee County site in south-central Colorado would be its first spring in the state.
Bruce Lauerman, natural resources manager for Nestle, said the company has been looking for spring water in Colorado since 2006 to cut the costs of shipping bottled water from California.
The water must be of a certain quality and not be fed by surface water for the company to call it spring water.
“It’s such a small, what I’ll call a surgical, extraction of spring water from this aquifer,” Lauerman said of the Chaffee County project.
The company says the project would generate temporary construction jobs and tax revenue for the county.
