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February 20, 2008
Lawmakers Save Pennies, Spend Dollars Like Water
Wednesday February 20, 2008
I’m looking forward to the reinstallation of the old horse-water trough in the Capitol’s first floor, if the latest cockamamie idea floats to the top of the Sargasso Sea called the General Assembly.
In fact, in 14 years covering state government, I can’t think of too many things that have the potential to be a bigger waste of time, than the idea floated this morning to eliminate the water coolers in the Capitol complex and install seven water fountains.
The designation of the state tartan pattern is right up there in Cockamamieville. The ill-fated proposal to designate Windsor Loamy Sand as the state soil, is another.
But it’s symptomatic of the Legislature. You can’t make the schools better and our kids competitive, so you might as well eliminate the water coolers in the Capitol and Legislative Office Building and call it a money-saving and environmentally conscious effort.
One of the many bad things about this public-relations idea is that it comes from Rep. Beth Bye, D-West Hartford, whose dramatic, progressive testimony to the Judiciary Committee last year on gay rights won me over.
But this latest idea seems like election-year pandering, especially when kids from Farmington and West Hartford were brought in as props for the news conference this morning.
Then there’re the phony facts. Yes, we have good drinking water. But her charges of exorbitant expense and environmental impact are half baked, or at least overblown.
“Connecticut enjoys some of the best tap water in the United States,” she said. “Strong environmental laws and regulations protect our watershed and makes drinking water safe and accessible, yet each day when legislators or folks who work in the building want a drink of water, they use Poland Spring water coolers and others go down to the cafeteria and purchase a bottle of water and the cost of that purchase is actually double the price of a gallon of gasoline.”
She said that in the Legislative Office Building, bottled water costs $11,600 a year “when we have good tap water piped in,” while it costs $460,000 a year in all state office buildings. “This seems silly,” she said. “We have such good water to be trucking it in from far away.”
Then she segued into those ubiquitous plastic water bottles “1,000 years to decompose.” She noted that last year, 340 million water bottles were incinerated or ended up in landfills in the state. That’s fine and dandy, but the state’s deposit-bottle law has absolutely nothing to do with the proposal to eliminate water jugs.
(In the spirit of full disclosure, up here in the Capitol press room, which is accessible only by walking up a flight of stairs, there is a water cooler with a five-gallon jug of Poland Spring)
In Bye’s vision, the new water fountains would have spigots, so reusable cups, like the one on my cluttered desk here, could be used.
Since it WAS a news conference and there WERE TV cameras, Attorney General Dick Blumenthal joined the scrum of lawmakers including Rep. Dick Roy, D-Milford, co-chairman of the Environment Committee.
“We ought to be using tap water,” Blumenthal pronounced. “We should do more things around here without legislating,” Roy said. “I don’t know why people don’t complain when they spend more for water than they do gasoline.”
Let’s not let the facts get in the way of our attitudes, I always say. So I called Brian Flaherty, director of public affairs for Nestle Waters of North America, Inc., which owns Poland Spring.
Flaherty, who is a former Republican member of the state House, knows the name of the game, so he wouldn’t impugn Bye’s motives. He did say, however, that those 5-gallon jugs get refilled up to 35 times before they are recycled and cost between $4 and $4.50 each. So that’s less than a dollar a gallon. Uh….what’s gasoline going for these days? Is someone having a gas sale we should know about? Flaherty said that the average cost at the supermarket, for all sizes of water, is about $1.61 a gallon.
Before I went to Bye’s news conference I called Eric Connery, facilities administrator for the Office of Legislative Management, which runs the Capitol complex. He said the contract with Poland Spring is in the first year of a three-year, $32,000-a-year deal, which does not have a cancellation clause.
Don’t you hate it when the truth gets in the way of political agendas? _________________________________________________________________
Posted by Ken on February 20, 2008 9:32 PM
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Comments
Have they tasted the Hartford Tap water, its great if you like metallic flavor with a rat dropping aftertaste.
Posted by: ctroadrunner at February 21, 2008 3:00 AM
Aren't there water fountains already at the Capitol? I saw a few just outside of the House Chambers the other day - I never noticed them until now. Perhaps Beth hadn't either. Could you point them out to her when you see her?
What is the underlying agenda here, that you referred to? I'd truly like to know.
I heard that there were water fountains at the Capitol years ago and the state spent millions ripping them out - Why?
What were the initial reasons for ordering water jugs at the Capitol? Had someone/or many people received water born parasites from the water?
If the water in Hartford is so clean, then why the Big Dig Project (now $2.1+ billion and growing)?
Has Beth Bye been advocating for some kind of tax relief for West Hartford's disproportionate share of paying MDC's corrupt water bills? Now ain't that a great example of Regionalism? Has Beth done anything else at the Capitol that we can thank her for?
I hope we regionalize all services...perhaps West Hartford can pay for all services in their region; particularly Hartford. Regionalize, universalize, socialize - all one in the same. Who's going to pay for it all? West Hartford. Thanks, Beth...the landfills are definitely worth advocating for....forget about us, your constituents, we want you up there at the Capitol advocating for a heap of garbage.
Posted by: West Hartford Resident at March 11, 2008 1:30 AM
Any status on this bill? And does your opinion change with this week's vote by the U.S. Conference of Mayors to ban bottled water purchased with taxpayer dollars?
Posted by: Ari Herzog at June 25, 2008 6:19 PM
