Nestlé is preparing to suck 150 million gallons of spring water per year from the small town of Waitsburg, Washington -- and city council didn’t even know about the deal until after it started work on the project.

In fact, council had first heard that Nestlé was interested in building a water bottling plant on top of the town’s watershed just last week -- but the mayor had been in secret discussions with the massive multinational for six months before letting council know.

This is classic Nestlé: find a willing partner, keep locals in the dark and move quickly to suck up as much groundwater as it can for maximum profit. How do we know? Over 150,000 of us just stopped it from doing the exact same thing in Mt. Hood, Oregon.

We beat Nestlé in Oregon and we'll beat it in Washington too. Tell Waitsburg City Council to halt the Nestlé water bottling plant until it gets more information.

There’s a reason we’re seeing Nestlé snap up more and more water bottling permits for shockingly low amounts (in Oregon Nestlé was going to pay one cent for 40 gallons of pristine spring water). As climate change wreaks havoc on our ecosystems and drought ravages the country, corporations like Nestlé know that future profits will be made on the one resource we can’t live without: water.

Don’t mistake for one second that this is just another isolated incident, one small town making a simple deal with a giant corporation. We fight Nestlé anywhere because if we lose, we’ll lose everywhere. And this fight comes down to this fundamental question: Who do we want to control our water supply? People? Or corporations?

Make sure Nestlé hears what you think. Tell Waitsburg City Council to hit the pause button on this disastrous decision until it learns everything.

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