Bloomfield bottling plant opposition misguided

John Horak

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By John Horak

The April 7, 2014, edition of the Hartford Business Journal included a column (“Connecticut's Struggle with Profits”) in which I noted that there is underlying “cultural antipathy in the state to the very concept of 'profit' and, of course, to the business and commercial enterprises from which it emerges.” While GE's departure is the most salient example, two seemingly unrelated local events reveal the depth of this anti-business prejudice and its victims.

The first event was the March 26 Hartford Yard Goats jobs fair, at which 1,400 people applied for 300 minimum-wage seasonal jobs. The second involves ongoing attempts by a grassroots group and state legislators to put the kibosh on a water bottling plant to be built in Bloomfield.

A March 26 Internet video on the Hartford Courant website showed a Yard Goats job applicant, who says (I paraphrase) that he “really needs the job so he came out to see what was offered and that the jobs are great … grounds keeping, ticket sales and a lot of positions open.” Some simple arithmetic indicates that 1,100 of the 1,400 applicants will not get a Yard Goats job. There is no association representing the interests of these 1,100 people and I am writing this column to support their cause.

In Bloomfield the conundrum is this: Niagara, a California-based purveyor of bottled water is set to build a 440,000-square-foot plant in which it would produce plastic bottles of water for sale. The water will be purchased from the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC), which has a sufficient supply to do the deal.

Niagara would use its money to build the plant. There are some tax incentives being offered that, for better or worse, are commonly used these days as an economic development tool. The plant would hire 38 people at the start and up to 125 when production is ramped up. The jobs would pay about $36,000 per year — just under $16 per hour — which is higher than the Yard Goat's positions and above the $15 minimum (living) wage that has garnered national support.

I am sure that many of the 1,100 people not hired by the Yard Goats will line up around the block (as they did in Hartford on March 26) to fill out applications for jobs at the bottling plant if it gets built. As they contemplate this new job opportunity, I hope that someone makes them aware of the ferocious grassroots opposition to the plant — which has coalesced into an organization called “Save our Water,” and which is supported by residents, local college students and State Sen. Beth Bye (D-West Hartford). They are supporting Senate Bill 422, which will use regulation of water as a means to stymie economic growth of this type.

I have poured over the Save Our Water musings on the web in search of the rationale for putting its interests above those of the Yard Goats “Eleven Hundred,” and as near as I can tell, it is based on the former group's aversion to plastics and profits and its affection for water.

The plastics issue is the bottles (which, according to opponents, are produced daily in amounts sufficient to stretch from New York to San Francisco). This seems like a gross exaggeration to me; but even if they would stretch only to Topeka, water is a fluid (like beer, wine, milk, soda and juice) necessary to our survival and it needs a container of some sort in which to be brought to market.

Moreover, I typically reuse the plastic bottles by filling them with tap water for consumption around the house, and the others end up in the recycling bin (becoming raw material to support the jobs of recyclers).

The profits issue is, well, the notion, as calculated by Sen. Bye (who sponsored the legislation to kill the plant), that profits will be 50 cents per bottle giving the plant capacity to create $2 billion in profits each year. But wait, even if she is right (industry members claim her math is preposterous), are we talking gross profit or net profit? Pre-tax or post-tax (Connecticut needs tax revenue and the higher the profit the greater the tax)?

Profit of any type is also a function of raw materials costs, so the MDC will have some say in the profit margins when setting the price at which it sells the water. What about the profits to be made by the businesses in Bloomfield at which the plant's employees will be spending their earnings each year?

Finally, there is the water. We drink water daily and it goes without saying that it is also recycled — first through our bodies then through treatment plants before flowing back to the earth where it serves as a habitat for fish and other aquatic life.

I love the environment and spend as many hours as possible each year boating and fishing on the Connecticut River. However, any way I look at this issue the case advanced by Sen. Bye and other opponents simply does not hold water when compared to the case of the 1,100 folks who were not hired by the Yard Goats — some of whom might consider attending the next meeting of Save Our Water to see if they can be convinced otherwise.

John M. Horak has practiced law at Reid and Riege P.C. in Hartford since 1980. His opinions are his own.

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