Martin Chavez and Bottled Water: Days Late, Dollars Short, Feudal Metaphors Right on Time

[the boy]

Yay! Marty against bottled water! But what's this? The whole San Juan Chama project from years back has a small link (to the top of the left column) for the San Juan Chama bottle water giveaway. The link is broken, but the water bottle giveaway was real enough. So what's the point? It's absurd, I know, but could it be that our dear Baron of 'Burque, our Qadi of The Q, our Feudal King of our fair Duke City, is a tad hypocritical?

[Benny the Icepick]

If you watch the video on the city website to the very end, it shrinks and displays "related videos." One is called "Strangle," and depicts two muscular men in their undies. I have to wonder how YouTube determined that to be related to bottled water.

[Nora]

Benny: Automation is the best thing ever.

[bleve]

Green washing at its best... lets curb bottled drinking water at meetings but let the developers have all the water they want... no need to talk about where it comes from as we have a vast 10-15 year supply.

[tinsree]

the mayor may be a hypocrite but i have to agree with him.
what's the point? even if you non-use is better than all the recycling in the world. and its not just the packaging, it's the fuel consumption in bottling and delivering, its the depletion of other peoples resources. for all the "localvores," this ought to be right up your alley. taste bad? get a filter.

[the boy]

@ tinsree - I agree wholeheartedly with this new move on behalf of the mayor. Thew Chama water is interesting, because in order to make people know it was good, drinkable water, they decided to bottle it. Bottling equates with taste in people's perception, if not reality. But water is water, and tap makes perfect since. My favorite wording of that argument comes from this Lewis Black clip. (The clip is safe for work if you wear headphones and don't have people looking over your shoulder often)

[tinsree]

the boy, consider yourself on team yauch, adam yauch of the beastie boys that is...

[Rodney]

The bottled San Juan-Chama water was a promotional gimmick, nothing else. Marty isn't being clever or inventive, many other mayors and CEO types have come out against using government funds (city, county, state etc) or stockholders money to by bottled water as well as the waste issue associated.
HOwever, the SJ-C water project has HUGE downsides that were not addressed in the bottled water fiasco (some bottles had black slime in them). The water treatment plant is still under construction, so exactly how did those bottled samples really relate to the actual product of the SJ-C project? Will the water be treated adequately to address ALL of the issues regarding the origin of the water? Remember, the Rio Grande, which will be the source of our drinking water, flows below the canyons at Los Alamos National Labs, where they have been dumping radioactive wastes for years.
The New Mexico Environmental Dept. has issued advisories against eating fish from Cochiti due to PCB and mercury concentrations. A study released in 1999 found high radionuclide and heavy metal (Cesium-134. Sodium-22. Plutonium-239. Americum-241. ) concentrations in fish from rivers that contain runoff from below LANL.

In addition, the river is subject to periodic spills from the Rio Rancho waste water treatment facility, essentially raw sewage gets dumped into the river, less than 10 miles from the intake to the SJ-C treatment facility. The river also contains chemical pesticides and fertilzers from agricultural and recreational (golf course) sources.

The SJ-C is being forced on an unwitting population with little or no public involvment. It represents an expenditure of nearly $300Million which was never ever put to a public vote. It sucks, big time.