LETTER: Bottling plant owner needs to be liable for added costs

I’m not a hydrologist, just someone who believes in fairness. I also don’t live in or near Creston. I also am not a lawyer and don’t know the laws regarding commercial water use.

That said, it seems to me if someone wants to place a major drain on a resource that others depend upon for daily living to start a business purely for his own financial profit (a water bottling plant in an area where homeowners might be required to drill new and deeper wells because of his commercial use as opposed to their residential use) that he be placed at some peril for doing so.

First, I have to say that the whole idea that one fills plastic bottles with water from a tap and sells it for more per gallon than gasoline is a bit of snake oil to me. I don’t drink bottled water, and if I did, I would refill it from my own RO system tap in my house. I am surprised that the tree huggers and global warming fanatics allow the scam of bottled water to continue.

But if we aren’t able to stop this apparent drain on our precious water (heck, we’ve already given control and distribution rights of all the valley’s rivers to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes ‚ what’s next, the forests? Oh, that’s right, we’ve already given a lot of those to the federal government), the county commissioners should require that the owner accept financial responsibility for any adjustments or new wells that his neighbors are required to install as a result of the drain his commercial facility puts on their pre-existing residential or farm wells.

That wouldn’t solve the problem of draining our precious aquifer by selling its water elsewhere to make a buck, but it would at least add a touch of fairness to this controversy.

As I said, I’m not a lawyer. And lawyers are the first ones to say that legal doesn’t necessarily mean right. But if the commissioners at least slow this train down by making the bottler go through the courts — and who knows, the courts might even do the right thing and provide justice rather than legality — he might just think twice about harming his neighbors to make a buck.

As I said, for me, it is about fairness ... for everyone, not just the businessman.

—P. David Myerowitz, Columbia Falls