Into the well of water wisdom

State Geologist Robert Marvinney ends his public talks with a pop quiz. How many gallons of water, he asks, are in the top inch of Moosehead Lake? My answer to him the other day was so far off I’d be embarrassed to tell you, but the correct response, he says, is 2 billion gallons. I’ll take his word for it because his point is sound: When it comes to water in Maine, the numbers are larger than you think and almost none of us knows anything about them.

This will matter shortly if Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap concludes that petitioners have turned in enough signatures on an initiative to tax bottled water, which would then either be approved by the Legislature or placed on the ballot. By exempting the first 500,000 gallons of water and charging only for bottled water, voters would be asked to direct a tax mostly at Poland Spring, owned by the giant Nestle.

The initiative would have Maine levy 20 cents per gallon to generate $100 million a year, according to the initiative’s originator, former state Rep. Jim Wilfong. What has carried the initiative as far as it has, however, is not merely the thrill of trying to extract money from a huge corporation but a much bigger idea: that Maine has something of value in its clean water.

Wilfong is on to something important with this, but it’s not at all clear that a tax is the best way to wring value from the water. When I asked a Poland Spring spokesman about it, he was definite: If the tax goes on, the company goes out of state. Maybe he was bluffing, I don’t know. I do know a tax directed largely at a single business in a single industry is as crude a method for raising revenue as there is.

It’s useful to put aside one part of this debate, the supply of water in Maine, and you can do it with Marvinney’s numbers. Of the 24 trillion gallons of water that, on average, falls on Maine each year, between 2 trillion and 5 trillion becomes ground water – temporarily, anyway. Of that, public water supplies use about 8 billion gallons, agriculture sucks up 360 million gallons and bottlers about 448 million, of which Poland Spring accounts for about half. There are two dozen smaller water bottlers in Maine that make up the rest, then there are various industries and all the home wells and other small uses. Even so, most of the water that doesn’t stay in storage runs off, for instance, through ponds and streams.

You measure water recharge by aquifer, not statewide, but Poland Spring, as with others, must get approval for water withdrawal from multiple state agencies, and the agencies seem to watching as well as negotiating. Poland Spring already pays a small royalty to Maine on its water from the Range Pond area, and despite the company’s growth in Maine – one measure: from 30 employees in 1980 to 550 now – it still consumes less than 1 percent of the water used in Maine.

The proposal that may come before voters is called An Act to Preserve Maine’s Drinking Water, but Maine should be less concerned about preserving it than using it well, whether through Poland Spring or farming or snow-making. “The aquifer doesn’t know any difference between community water use, irrigation or any other industry,” says Marvinney. “With the regulatory environment, you can do it in a way that has very limited impact and still have abundant resources.”

Wilfong argues that Mainers have spent billions of dollars to keep state water clean and now that “in this century, water is to Maine in importance, as oil has been to Saudi Arabia in the last one,” we should see some pay- back beyond, presumably, the pleasure of safe drinking water. He may be right. If in much of the world, clean drinking water is a scarcity, then places that have it in abundance should be even more aware of what they have. Deciding on the value of groundwater, however, is tricky business and not the kind of thing that lends itself to being solved through initiative. Dense books have been written on the subject, but who has time to review applied methods of nonmarket economic valuation?

For that, you want a study, one that includes Marvinney and Wilfong, bottlers, environmental groups and public-water officials, among others. And next week, Maine may have one through its Land and Water Resources Council, which the Legislature last session asked to review Maine’s current water rules and make sure they are consistent and effective. But it should go further, with legislative permission. It should directly address the issues raised by Wilfong.

It could, for instance, estimate the value and future demands on Maine’s ground water, determine the costs of protecting and examine ways that other comparable states have used this natural resource to their financial advantage. The council would likely find more interesting answers than just taxing the most obvious user. If it did, the purpose of the initiative could be fulfilled without the addition of the tax.

The opportunity might also come with its own deadline, the potential vote on the referendum, which coincides with the original reporting time for the council. About 50,000 Maine citizens thought enough of Wilfong’s idea to sign his petition. Wouldn’t it be great if, through a public process that allowed for more creativity, Maine took on the complicated questions of water use and tried to solve them outside the over-simple venue of a campaign?

My apologies, by the way, to Bob Marvinney for spilling the beans on his pop quiz.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.