I'm not sure how I feel about this...Follow

Here's the deal.

Maine wants to start taxing entities that extract water from the ground. It would be a per gallon tax, but the first million gallons of water extracted per year, are exempt. So, it's only gonna affect those sucking A LOT of water out of the ground...or, Poland Springs Bottling Company. They're the only ones, currently, that this would affect.

I'm not necessarily against taxing groundwater use, but it seems this is simply a policy to generate tax money because the state is broke - and Poland Springs isn't, rather than a carefully thought out policy to oversee the use of a valuable natural resource.

Poland Springs is one of Maines bigger, and better employers. They're reportedly a good company to work for and have seemed to be decent stewards of the natural environment that they depend on (except that they are responsible for the generation of billions of plastic bottles of water that get trucked all over the continent).

There are some that are equating this to Alaska state government generating income by taxing oil as it's extracted from the states subsurface.

I'm just not sure about taxing water.

Alaska does tax its oil industry. That's why they can afford to send everyone checks.

The primary difference here being whose coffers the tax revenue goes to.

Some of the problem in general is generated by overuse of purchased water vs. water from the tap. I don't know. I've had a problem with the way that buying water has continued to undermine public utilities. It's a major social justice issue. We should not be buying water when we have clean, safe water available. There has been an erosion of public confidence which might lead to further privatization of the water system. I think Poland Springs should be more culpable.

Edited, May 6th 2009 11:11am by Annabella

Poland Spring tastes better than my tap water, so I'm going to continue drinking that.

You should do a blind taste-test.

(Classic Coke > New Coke...I don't care if they are the same formula!!)

Edited, May 6th 2009 6:50pm by Elinda

It's bigger than that. We should actively work against inroads to corporations privatizing water. This is a group who describes alot of reasons to oppose it:

http://www.citizen.org/cmep/Water/general/

I listened pretty intently once to a story about a river up in Canada that, through a fairly circuitous route ended up being privately owned, that is, the water rights were privately owned. It started out that the farmers along the river, to insure equitable use for irrigation, began a coop. They essentially paid the province for the rights, but both parties failed to looked ahead.

Eventually one big developer started buying up the farmland and of course the water rights. So the developer is building houses, selling them to folks and then charging them for their water. It was pretty crazy. But it was Canada eh.

But yeah, knowing that much stricter, or at least much broader, governing of water rights will likely be necessary in the future, is part of what's makes me question the soundness of this willy-nilly regulation of one company.

I do think bottled water, unless it's for use in areas that lack potable water, very wasteful.

Edit to add - Poland Springs does not 'own' rights to the aquifer.



Edited, May 6th 2009 7:27pm by Elinda

Yeah but unless the government entity that is levying this tax is dredging it up out of the ground prior to it being funneled to this company, neither do they.

My english to you-know-what-I-mean dictionary disagrees with you.

But that aside, I've never understood how we as the general public have let government as a whole get so far into our pockets via taxation to begin with. We've just gotten used to it I suspect, I mean we all (most all) complain about all the taxes we pay, but we still pay them. We're not truly a country of organizers anymore, which I suppose is good in it's own right.

While a lot of people like to romanticize about the fact our founding fathers fought to lesson the burden of their taxation they often forget they did so through a war against the government of their time.

Not a lot of people going to be rallying around that idea, and the ones that do are the crazies.