Garret Ellison

MLive reporter Garret Ellison has won a national journalism award for a series of stories about bottled water giant Nestle's application to pump more ground water from its Michigan wells.

It's a story that could have been missed had Ellison not found a public notice buried on a state website in October 2016.

Ellison was announced Tuesday, Feb. 13, as the 2018 recipient of the Public Notice Resource Center's Public Notice Journalism Award.

"Garret's work on the Nestle story, from its inception, is the definition of watchdog reporting in the public's interest," said John Hiner, vice president of content for MLive Media Group. "Great stories don't fall out of the sky -- they are the result of diligent work, attention to detail, and gaining expertise and the trust of sources. Garret embodies all of those qualities, and I'm happy he's being recognized for leading the way on the Nestle story."

Ellison is the first reporter in the history of the contest to receive the award for a story that revealed the inadequacy of a notice posted on a government website, according to a release from the Public Notice Resource Center.

"If it wasn't for Garret Ellison's dogged, shoe-leather reporting, this story almost certainly would not have been brought to light," said Public Notice Resource Center President Brad Thompson, also president and CEO of Detroit Legal News Publishing.

"The citizens of Michigan would have learned about it after Nestle's application had been approved with no public input," Thompson said. "How many other stories like this have been buried because a public notice was published on a page on a government website that nobody visits?"

On Oct. 31, 2016, Ellison noticed something on the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality website that everyone else missed. Nestle Waters North America, which owns the Ice Mountain bottled water plant in Stanwood, was asking to increase the groundwater pumped from an Oceola County well by 167 percent.

Public notice of the application was listed in the DEQ Environmental Calendar, a bi-weekly clearinghouse for permitting decisions, new administrative rules and other official notices. The calendar is not widely read by the general public.

A citizen group that has fought Nestle for years to reduce the company's allowed withdrawal was unaware of the application until they were contacted by MLive.

With the public comment period scheduled to end in four days, Ellison quickly pulled together a story.

The resulting deluge of feedback ultimately prompted the DEQ to extend the public review period and hold a public hearing.

Within the first three days after the story published, the DEQ reported receiving 3,000 comments. By April 2017, DEQ Director Heidi Grether said she had personally received over 35,000 emails about the proposal.

In a later story, Grether admitted the notice given may have fallen short.

"Was this advertised and noticed in a way it should have been? Probably not, it appears to me," she said.

The initial story about a public notice that was nearly missed marked a starting point for in-depth reporting on the issue by MLive and Ellison ever since.

For winning the contest, Ellison receives a $500 award and is invited to Washington D.C. to be honored at a March 15 dinner at the National Press Club.

Other reporters awarded honorable mentions for superior public notice reporting this year included Cody Griesel of The Newkirk (Oklahoma) Herald Journal; Brian Hunhoff of the Yankton County (South Dakota) Observer; and Jim Lockwood of The Scranton (Pennsylvania) Times-Tribune.

The Virgina-based Public Notice Resource Center describes its mission as "promoting effective public notice and educating the public about its right to know." It began offering its annual journalism award in 2014.

Read more from Ellison on the topic of Nestle Water's groundwater extraction in Michigan and the issues surrounding it: