Bottled Water Should Be Held to the Same Standard as Other Drinking Water in California--And You Can Do Something About It

Please take a couple of minutes to put the draft letter (below) on your letterhead and send the letter to Governor Schwarzenegger. You can either put the letter in the mail or fax it to the Governor. The address and fax number are provided in the draft letter. Feel free to contact Barb Byrne (bbyrne@pcl.org, 916-313-4524) if you have any questions about SB 220.

With your help, come January 1st SB 220 will be law!

Thank you!

The Honorable Arnold Schwarzenegger
Governor of California
State Capitol
Sacramento, CA 95814
Via FAX: (916) 445-4633

Re: Support for SB 220 – The Bottled and Vended Water Accountability Act

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger:

On behalf of [Organization Name], I am writing to urge you to sign SB 220, the Bottled and Vended Water Accountability Act, into law when it reaches your desk. This important bill will ensure that bottled water plants and water vending machines are regularly inspected and that consumers are able to obtain basic information about the quality of the water for which they pay a premium.

More than 70% of Californians drink bottled and/or vended water. While many consumers purchase bottled and vended water in the belief that it is safer than tap water, these supplies are actually less subject to oversight than the water agencies that provide tap water to the same communities. Proper enforcement and public scrutiny are needed to ensure that consumers receive the high quality water they expect when they make this purchase. Unfortunately, the enforcing agency (the Department of Health Services Food and Drug Branch) lacks the resources and regulatory tools to provide this oversight. In fact, in the case of water vending machines, inspections are only conducted when complaints are received leaving low-income, immigrant communities, who rely heavily on vended water as their primary source of drinking water, unprotected.

SB 220 provides the tools needed to adequately regulate this industry by:
-- Setting up an inspection program
-- Ensuring that water quality information for bottled water is available to the public
-- Requiring that water vending machines post key information in Spanish as well as English.

While the costs of this program will be funded by an increase in annual licensing fees, the increase is still in line with license fees in other states.

We strongly urge you to sign SB 220 into law and provide bottled and vended water consumers with the protections they expect and deserve.

Gary Patton is the Executive Director of the Planning and Conservation League, a statewide, nonprofit lobbying organization. For more than thirty years, PCL has fought to develop a body of environmental laws in California that is the best in the United States. PCL staff review virtually every environmental bill that comes before the California Legislature each year. It has testified in support or opposition of thousands of bills to strengthen California's environmental laws and fight off rollbacks of environmental protections.