If Lemons Can Be Turned Into Lemonade - Why Can't DWP Water Be Turned Into... Owens Valley Water? Save City Hall From The French!

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-water3jan03,1,6059174.story?coll=la-headlines-california

It turns out that the DWP - and other Los Angeles City agencies, including many in City Hall - are not only using Sparkletts water coolers in their offices, but they are even buying plastic bottles of Sparkletts water.

This is wrong in so many ways - the worst of which has yet to be discussed.

DWP Pays to Drink Sparkletts

L.A.'s supplier of tap water accounts for more than a third of the city money spent on the bottled variety.

Patrick McGreevy Times Staff Writer January 3, 2006

Despite spending $1 million in the last two years to assure Los Angeles residents that their tap water is not only safe to drink but also top quality, city officials spent $88,900 in public money during that time on bottled water from private firms.

First, while Sparkletts was founded in LA in 1925 (in then recently annexed Eagle Rock), it is now part of Danone Waters which is headquartered not in LA, but in... Pasadena. And Danone Waters is really a subsidiary of DS Waters which is headquartered in... Atlanta. And to even further muddy the already murky waters, DS Waters is really owned by the Danone Group which is actually headquartered in... Paris.

Which is in ... France!

Yes, that's right. People in City Hall are drinking FRENCH water! Which certainly explains a lot about what has gone on over there in the past few years.

Added to this, nestled in the same place where our DWP gets its best water - the Owens Valley - there is - at this very moment- another foreign interloper taking our water and selling it to back to us as premium bottled water. Yes, the same water the DWP uses is being sold back to us under the Crystal Geyser brand, owned by a company headquartered in the Northern California town of Calistoga.

But hold on... that's not where the REAL headquarters is. Crystal Geyser is just a subsidiary of a San Francisco holding company that is in reality owned by ... the Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company headquartered in... Japan!

So where does that leave us?

Well, since the main reason for using Sparkletts is that it is locally based - NOT! - and because it has water coolers with instant hot water taps - that the DWP does not - so why doesn't the DWP contract with a LA-based firm to set-up a bottled water company - with rentable water coolers - and allow them to build a plant on DWP land and use DWP spring water from the Owens Valley and call it, Owens Valley Water.

This way we can not only have our own water - and but we can drink it, too!