ACT TO SAVE OUR CT WATER NOW!
Dear Hartford Resident,
Have you heard of the fight going on in Connecticut to protect our precious public resource, our water, from commercial exploitation? We need your voice to help our legislature pass an important bill:
SB 422: AN ACT CONCERNING RESIDENTIAL WATER RATES,
SB 422: AN ACT CONCERNING RESIDENTIAL WATER RATES,
PUBLIC DRINKING WATER SUPPLY EMERGENCIES AND
SELLERS OF BOTTLED WATER.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
- Submit testimony via email or personally at the public hearing.
- Come to the hearing on March 11th with as many friends as possible. We need to demonstrate to our legislators that we want our water protected. No signs or banners allowed inside the legislature. Flyers and buttons encouraged
- Contact your state legislators and members of the Planning & Development Committee to express your support of these bills.
- Spread the word and tell your friends.
THE PROBLEM: The Metropolitan District Commission (MDC), the public water supply agency serving twelve towns in the Hartford area, has made a special deal with Niagara Bottling, a California based, multinational, multimillion dollar company, to allow them to take up to 1.8 million gallons per day of our public water. Niagara plans to put the water in single serve plastic bottles at a bottling plant in Bloomfield that could produce up to 10+ million plastic bottles per day. The MDC passed rate discount ordinances benefiting only Niagara that would save the bottling company approximately $2 million every year. Bloomfield elected officials gave Niagara a $4.9 million tax abatement over seven years without a real cost-benefit analysis.
YOU CAN SUBMIT WRITTEN TESTIMONY
Niagara Bottling has started lobbying the CT legislature. It's crucial that each of us sends in written testimony supporting Sen. Bye's "Substitute" Water Bill SB 422 no later than Thursday, March 10th, in preparation for the Legislative Hearing Friday March 11th at 11 AM.
2. Include your name and the bill number SB422. Put "Substitute" SB 422 in the subject line.
3. The bill language as raised in committee requires revised language. Support the substitute with such points such as:
- Protect residents, not water bottlers, during a drought. If the Department of Public Health declares a Drought Advisory, production of bottled water out of state should stop.
- Rescind water rate discounts for water bottlers . They extract large amounts of our municipal water and spring water, fill the environment with plastic pollution, and profit while citizens are conserving and paying more.
- Rescind the Special Sewer Service Charge discount for water bottlers (now known as the Clean Water Project Charge). CT ratepayers have paid for years to build infrastructure for clean water; no discounts for corporations.
- Re-establish a citizen MDC (Metropolitan District Commission) watch dog committee .
- Impose a moratorium on any new large water capacity agreements until the State Water Plan is completed and addresses this issue.
ATTEND THE PUBLIC HEARING IF YOU CAN
The Hearing is scheduled for 11 am on March 11th in the Legislative Office Building (LOB), 300 Capitol Ave, Hartford. Plan to arrive early; you may want to carpool. When you enter the LOB, you will need to go through security, so allow extra time for that.
Parking: Park in the garage behind the LOB. Pull in the LOB driveway, go around back, and take the garage entrance on the right for visitors (there are signs). If there is no space in that section, exit, take a right at the stop sign, drive further to the back and there is a 2nd entrance with parking underneath the building. If the garage is full, there’s an adjacent surface lot, and also on-street parking nearby.
CONTACT LEGISLATORS
Call or send a personal e-mail to the Co-chairs of the Planning and Development Committee: Sen. Cathy Osten (860-240-0579) and Rep. Philip Miller (860-388-7208). Other members of the P & D Committee can be found at https://www.cga.ct.gov/pd/. If your legislator is among the members of the P&D Committee, ask them to support SB422.
SPREAD THE WORD AND TELL YOUR FRIENDS. This bill needs support from throughout the state.
What happened in Bloomfield could happen elsewhere in CT.
Together let's protect our water for future generations!
Together let's protect our water for future generations!
8 comments:
This movement is much ado about nothing. It is a classical example of sheep herd mentality. The herder screams "wolf" and al, the sheep look out at the hillside and spy a form crawling down. Then in a stampede never seen before, the sheep run in formation and keep running till exhausted.
MDC has a right to sell water to anyone who wants it. I could run my tap all day and night if I wanted to. I favor business development and real full-time job development not the phoney few part-time minimum wage positions that Hartford is paying 90 million to produce.
.
I do find however, MDC to be disingenuous after years of instructing their small user base how to save with distribution of water savor devices. This project has been so successful that it has succeeded and supassed its goals of drastic reduction of consumption. As water use is reduced and the consumer saves, revenue is reduced by MDC and this requires the water company to raise rates or in this case, agree to sell water to an outside source at vastly reduced rates. And this I find to be a filthy stinking lie. So I am in favor of business development but not the deception perpetrated by Mr DeBella 's water company.
Wait what? How they can they sell a natural resource from the land without a vote isn't clean water limited anyway? Didn't we just see what happened in Flint Michigan?? Omg another case of big business selling out the small guy totally disgusting
A bunch of wealthy naive tree huggers trying to force their agenda down everyone else's throat
4:15
Not true. The cause should be made exclusively around deep discounts for the water. Instead of the usual case for discounts on quantity, the discount should be reduced in order to subsides home consumers. Not the idea of new business development.
How can there be so much "Extra" water to sell, when almost every Summer we're asked not to water our lawns or wash our cars because the water levels are low?
RB:
Suggestion; in summer, whenever it rains, run outside naked in your back yard with a bar of soap and wash. You will save on MDC water usage. And only flush once a day. Bingo.
Anonymous 1:18
I have suggestion for you, but I'm sure Mr. Brookman wouldn't publish it.
Obviously, you're a Liberal- attacking the messenger instead of answering the question.
Anonymous, all you have is a bunch of unsupported point, no facts, pure ignorance really.
If you stand by your points, why not publish your identity? For fear of getting recognized while
pushing your BS agenda?
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