Ian James

TDS

The chairman of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians said Thursday that the Nestle bottled water factory in Cabazon is using water sustainably and responsibly, and that it provides important economic benefits for the area.

Tribal Chairman Robert Martin defended a policy of not releasing water usage data in the Cabazon area, saying that as in many parts of California, local water users – including the tribe and others – haven't been required to report such information.

"Most groundwater use in California isn't subject to any reporting, and I think we fall in that. We're not going to be held to a double standard where other authorities don't have to report and now you're asking us to report. We're not going to do that," Martin said in a meeting with The Desert Sun, held in response to a July 14 article that explored questions about how much water the Nestle plant is using.

Martin pointed out that the tribe has submitted reports on a portion of its water usage to the Beaumont-Cherry Valley Water District, where reporting is required because the groundwater supply has been adjudicated.

There are no such requirements in the Cabazon area, where the factory bottles Arrowhead 100% Mountain Spring Water as well as purified water sold under the brand Nestle Pure Life. And some people in the area have questioned the potential impacts on the desert water supply, especially during the drought.

"We report our groundwater in neighboring managed basins, where it's fair and we're not at a disadvantage, and there's not a double standard," Martin said. "We're not opposed to reporting."

Martin attended the meeting with other representatives of the Morongo tribe and a manager from Nestle Waters North America Inc.

The bottling plant is operated by Nestle Waters, which leases the property from the tribe, and it has been drawing water from a spring in Millard Canyon for more than a decade. The factory is one of five used by Nestle Waters in California, three of which are in Southern California.

Larry Lawrence, natural resource manager for Nestle Waters, said the company consistently monitors flows of water and groundwater levels to ensure the operation is sustainable. He said that the company also conducts a biological survey once every five years, the last of which was in 2010, to check for effects on plants or animals. Those reports are submitted to the Morongo tribal government but are not publicly released.

"We've seen no changes really associated with our operations in any of our sources really in Southern California at all," Lawrence said of the biological surveys. He said the spring in Millard Canyon continues to flow.

"We maintain a good, strong flowing source of water. We're not doing any harm," Lawrence said.

He said the company also has a "drought mitigation plan," which has involved curtailing the amounts of water used from the Millard Canyon spring this year and offsetting that with water trucked in from other springs elsewhere in Southern California.

"We have five major springs in Southern California that we can pull from," Lawrence said, pointing out that the names of the other springs —ranging from Palomar Mountain Granite Springs to Coyote Springs in Inyo County — are listed on Arrowhead bottles along with the Southern Pacific Spring, which is the main source for the Cabazon plant.

In April, he said, the company proactively began using more water from other springs at the Cabazon factory in order to reduce the amounts drawn from the Millard Canyon spring.

"We recognized we weren't going to get any rain, so we started pulling back, knowing that, 'Hey, we're not going to get any rain,'" Lawrence said. "We've brought other springs online to lessen the impact from this source."

The company monitors groundwater levels and submits reports to the Morongo tribe.

"We haven't seen any significant impact at all on groundwater levels. Now of course they decline during droughts," Lawrence said. He added that those drought-related impacts have been much smaller than the severe declines seen elsewhere.

Martin said the Morongo tribe has a history of environmental stewardship that includes strictly monitoring all groundwater usage and replenishing the aquifer with surface water and up to 750,000 gallons daily from a water reclamation plant.

Until 2009, Nestle Waters submitted annual public reports to a group of local water districts showing how much water was being extracted from the spring in Millard Canyon. Reports compiled by the San Gorgonio Pass Water Agency show that the amounts varied from a high of 1,366 acre-feet in 2002 to a low of 595 acre-feet in 2005. In 2009, Nestle Waters reported 757 acre-feet of water drawn from the spring during the previous year, or about 245 million gallons.

Since then, the company has instead been turning over those reports confidentially to the Morongo tribe, a change that Lawrence said was agreed upon after the company and the tribe determined the reports had previously been submitted to the wrong entity.

Martin noted that the amount of water being bottled is relatively small when compared with big water users such as golf courses. The Morongo tribe owns a golf course that uses about 1 million gallons of water a day, Martin said, and there are a total of 124 golf courses nearby in the Coachella Valley.

The Arrowhead plant is one of many across the country that have been built to meet growing demand for bottled water. Nestle Waters North America, a subsidiary of Swiss-based Nestle that is headquartered in Stamford, Conn., says on its website that it has 29 bottled water facilities in the United States and Canada.

The Cabazon factory employs about 230 people, and the business helps the economy, Martin said. "I think they've been a good partner — to not just us, to the community."

It's unclear how state lawmakers' recent approval of legislation to regulate groundwater could affect the Cabazon area.

"It will force some kind of management program for our basin, which then we will become part of and interact with," said Roger Meyer, CEO of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians. "We don't quite understand how we fit in that mix, but it will require action."

Martin said if the water supply in Cabazon ends up with controls similar to those in Beaumont and Cherry Valley, the Morongo tribe would want to be involved and participate alongside other local water users. And if those other entities begin reporting on their groundwater use, he said, "we would certainly consider it."

In the Coachella Valley, public water agencies take a different approach and have released detailed information about the pumping of groundwater and water levels in wells.

The Morongo tribe's land lacks the supplies of imported water that have helped sustain cities elsewhere in Southern California. Meyer said that some flows of water from the surrounding mountains were long ago diverted away from the reservation to other communities.

The Morongo tribe has actively sought to defend its water rights, including in a pending case before the State Water Resources Control Board. The state has since 2003 sought to revoke the Morongo's license for a right to about 115 acre-feet of water per year from Millard Canyon, one of three such licenses under the tribe's ownership. State officials maintain the agricultural water right had lapsed and had been forfeited because it wasn't used for many years.

"We hope that we prevail on that, that we still have access to the water," Martin said. The water at stake in the case, he said, is used to replenish the aquifer, not for the Nestle bottling plant.

The Morongo tribe has about 1,100 members. Martin said 400 to 500 of them live on the reservation, while others live elsewhere in the country.

He emphasized that the Morongo tribe is legally entitled to use the amounts of water that are being bottled. "It's our water that we're using. It's not somebody's downstream from us. It's our water."