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$200
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What the Permit Actually Allows
The permit granted to Nestlé — and inherited by BlueTriton when the company acquired Nestlé's North American water brands in 2021 — covers withdrawal from the White Pine Springs well in Osceola Township, one of several extraction points the company operates in Michigan. The full Ice Mountain operation draws from nine wells total, pulling 1.1 million gallons daily from the broader system according to state DEQ records.
Michigan law governs groundwater through the "reasonable use" doctrine — a legal framework that allows property owners to use water beneath their land as long as the use is reasonable relative to other landowners. There is no per-gallon charge. There is no royalty. There is no volume-based fee. The $200 annual reporting fee covers the paperwork. The water itself costs nothing.
The 81,020-to-75 Vote That Didn't Matter
The public comment record on the Nestlé permit is one of the most lopsided in Michigan DEQ history. 81,020 total comments. 80,945 against. 75 in favor. A ratio of more than 1,000 to 1 in opposition.
The DEQ's response, in the words of then-director C. Heidi Grether: "Most of them related to issues of public policy which are not, and should not be, part of an administrative permit decision."
Read that sentence again. The agency charged with protecting Michigan's water resources received 80,945 objections from Michigan residents — and dismissed them as irrelevant to the permit decision because they raised public policy concerns rather than technical regulatory criteria.
The agency's position was legally defensible. Michigan's permit process evaluates applications against specific statutory criteria. Public opposition, however overwhelming, doesn't override a technically compliant application. The law was working exactly as designed — and the design produced a result that 80,945 people formally objected to.
The state's own explanation for approving the permit despite 80,945 objections is the most revealing document in this post — not because it shows corruption, but because it shows a system working exactly as designed, producing an outcome that 80,945 people found unacceptable.
DEQ Director Heidi Grether, April 2018: "Most of them related to issues of public policy which are not, and should not be, part of an administrative permit decision."
What this means: Michigan's permit law evaluates applications against technical criteria — hydrological impact, regulatory compliance, monitoring requirements. Whether the public believes a private company should extract a public resource for under $1,000 a year is not a criterion the law recognizes. The law was not designed to answer that question. So when 80,945 people asked it, the agency dismissed them — correctly, under the law as written.
Former state Rep. Peter Lucido, who introduced reform legislation: "When you're making billions of dollars on bottled water, it doesn't take much to get a team of lawyers and lobbyists to go ahead and put the fire out." He said he remembers four Nestlé lobbyists in his office after he introduced his bill. "Not everybody has the guts to stand up."
The result: Nine reform bills introduced. Zero passed. The lobbying math works when the economic incentive is large enough — and extracting 210 million gallons of water per year for under $1,000 generates enough margin to make the lobbying trivially cost-effective.
The Ontario Comparison: What "Fair" Would Look Like
Michigan's fee structure for water extraction is not unique — it reflects a nationwide pattern of treating groundwater as effectively free. But the comparison to Ontario, directly across the border, shows exactly what a different policy choice looks like in practice.
Ontario's fee — equivalent to approximately $670,000 per year — covers the same basic activity: extracting large volumes of groundwater from a public aquifer for commercial bottling. The fee difference is not a function of different geology, different economics, or different environmental conditions. It is a function of a different political decision about who owns the water beneath the ground.
Ontario ultimately closed Nestlé's Guelph plant entirely in 2024 after years of community opposition. The plant closed. The fees had been doing their work for seven years. Michigan's nine reform bills had not become law.
This detail appears in BlueTriton's own public statement, offered as evidence of corporate citizenship. It is the most clarifying sentence in the company's defense of its Michigan operations:
BlueTriton, in a public statement (2024): Its Ice Mountain brand "has a long history of supporting communities in times of need, such as delivering bottled water weekly to Flint for about four years after the state program ceased."
What this means: After the Flint water crisis — caused by a state decision to save money by switching water sources, which led to lead contamination in a majority-Black city — the state eventually ended its bottled water delivery program. BlueTriton filled the gap, delivering bottled water weekly to Flint residents who could not safely drink their tap water.
The water BlueTriton delivered to Flint: Extracted from Michigan aquifers. For under $1,000 per year per site. Bottled. Sold in Michigan stores at ~$1.50 per bottle. Donated to Flint as a charitable act — which the company then cited as evidence of its community commitment.
The structural irony: A company extracting a public resource for nearly nothing sells it back to Michigan consumers at retail price and donates some of it to a Michigan city whose public water system failed. The company is praised for the donation. The extraction fee that made it profitable is never mentioned in the same sentence.
The Governor Who Promised Reform — and the Legislature That Didn't Deliver
Gretchen Whitmer ran for governor in 2018 on a specific platform that included reforming Michigan's water bottling fee structure. She proposed a "severance tax or royalty similar to how mining companies are taxed" to — in her words — "control the siphoning of water in our state and ensure that there's some kind of public benefit."
She won. Democrats took the governor's office. In 2023, Democrats took both the state House and Senate for the first time in nearly four decades. The trifecta that reformers had been waiting for arrived. And as of June 2024 — per ProPublica's investigation — the Michigan Legislature had still not passed any of the nine reform bills introduced since the Nestlé permit controversy began.
The reason is not complicated. BlueTriton employs 285 people in Mecosta County. It contributes over $76 million to the regional economy annually, per a study it commissioned. It pays the city of Evart $3.50 per thousand gallons — the same rate residents pay — for municipal well access. In a rural part of Michigan with limited economic options, the company is a significant employer and economic presence.
The lobbying works because the economic stakes are asymmetric. For BlueTriton, the difference between under $1,000 per year and a volume-based fee worth hundreds of thousands is enormous — worth spending heavily to prevent. For any individual Michigan legislator in a rural district, the company's local employment presence is a real constituent concern. The math of the status quo is stable.
The legal framework is not unique to Michigan. Wayne State University water law professor Noah Hall confirmed: "Whether you're taking the water for growing crops, building widgets, drinking water or bottling it, we don't pay." Michigan's approach is nationally typical, not an outlier. Charging bottlers differently from farmers or manufacturers raises legitimate equal-treatment questions under existing water law.
The monitoring is real. The DEQ called the Nestlé operation "the most intensively monitored water withdrawals in the state." The permitting process did involve extensive hydrological analysis — including acknowledgment that one monitoring area showed potential streamflow depletion above 20% under the 400 gpm rate. The monitoring requirement, not absence of concern, was the regulatory response.
The employment argument is not pretextual. 285 jobs in Mecosta County, $76 million in regional economic contribution. In a rural area that has lost population and industry, these are not trivial numbers. The community trade-off between resource extraction and economic stability is a genuine tension, not a manufactured one.
BlueTriton's Flint deliveries were real aid. Whatever the structural irony, Flint residents received bottled water they needed during a genuine public health crisis. The charitable act and the extraction economics can both be true simultaneously.
What This Post and Post 4 Together Prove
Post 4 of this series documents the Flint water crisis — specifically the timeline of who knew what and when. General Motors switched away from the Flint River water supply in October 2014 because it was corroding engine parts. The state didn't acknowledge the public health crisis for another year. The children whose blood tests confirmed lead contamination were drinking the water during that gap.
Posts 2 and 4 together document something the individual stories don't make visible: two simultaneous Michigan water stories, unfolding at the same time, in the same state, involving the same resource — water — with radically different institutional responses.
BlueTriton extracts 210 million gallons per year from Michigan aquifers for under $1,000 annually. The permit sailed through a technical review process that dismissed 80,945 public objections as irrelevant policy concerns. Nine reform bills died in a legislature with every incentive to pass them.
Flint's public water system contaminated 100,000 residents — including 9,000 children — with lead. The contamination was known to state officials, suppressed, and eventually confirmed by outside researchers a year after the switch. The city had been under the control of an emergency manager making cost-cutting decisions. The community was majority Black and 40% in poverty.
Same state. Same resource. One entity paid under $1,000 per year and faced 80,945 objections that were legally irrelevant. The other paid with the neurological development of an entire generation of children.
In Post 3, we document the third story in this series — one where the resource gap is not about corporate extraction but about a treaty that has never been fully honored. The Navajo Nation has senior water rights from 1868. Thirty to forty percent of Navajo homes have no running water in 2026. The contrast with BlueTriton's $200 permit is not metaphorical. It is mathematical.
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