I live in a relatively rural country. There is some industry, but for now the landscape is dotted with family farms and horse farms, the latter a remnant of when the city was a thriving center for thoroughbred racing.

The county has also spent the last decade focusing on attracting light industry and warehouse facilities, especially if they are able to repurpose existing closed facilities, which leads us to an inactive 3M complex in Middleway. In 2024 Sidewinder Enterprises purchased it and proposed using the building as a “water bottling plant” called Mountain Pure.

It was clear from the beginning that Sidewinder thought this was going to be a cakewalk, and behaved accordingly.

Middleway district residents and the residents of the watershed area that would be affected, some of whom are farmers reliant on groundwater, and some of whom are lawyers, and former county commissioners, consistently attended public meetings with their concerns. There were concerns about increased traffic and heavy equipment running through the small town whose historic district is on the National Register of Historic Places. There were concerns about traffic at the narrow village intersections.

Mostly there was a question about the difference between a company located in the space and using the groundwater for its day-to-day business, and a company located in the space and selling the groundwater for profit.

Sidewinder’s response wasn’t particularly confidence building:

Mark Dyck, from Integrity Federal Services and representing Sidewinder, explained that Sidewinder would be willing to arrange its pumps to only take “the cream off the top,” as planning commissioner Donnie Fisher described it. If the water level drops under 15 feet, the pumps would stop completely.

And

Shepp continued, saying that if the commission had a water study to look at some of these issues and solve some of these questions, it could ease some of these concerns. However, the county commission has not committed to spending the money to conduct a study.

Dyck shared that he believes the studies already conducted were sufficient, and a county-wide study would only say another study was needed on the site, which he said was already completed.

“The only way that I can provide the planning commission with a guarantee is providing you a zone where we will not pump,” Dyck said. “If it goes down 15 feet below the water elevation right now, the pump’s getting turned off. I don’t know how we can give a better guarantee to the county, to the farmers, to the residents.”

In other words

Last week the Jefferson County Planning Commission unanimously rejected the proposal. But it’s important to note that that was only possible because some of the commissioners who had voted aye earlier rescinded their aye votes after the public outcry was so loud and consistent and unwavering that they really had no other choice. And because the incoming chair admitted he had assumed the proposal had been thoroughly vetted prior to his tenure, and it hadn’t been.

Sidewinder is still making noise about how they’re not done yet fighting the town, and maybe in the end they will win out. And maybe they won’t in this new world where regular people are standing up against the rich people who want to take the stuff that is important and things that are good, like adequate clean water. I’m betting on the latter.

There are a lot of songs about water out there. Here’s a lesser-known one.