Fight over plan to bottle water in Oregon town is on ballot

CASCADE LOCKS, Oregon (AP) — This little town, set below steep, forested mountainsides at the bottom of the Columbia River Gorge, stubbornly persists, eight decades after a dam was built downstream, drowning the navigational locks that gave the place its name and main income.

Many businesses have gone the way of the Scenic Winds Motel, whose cabins are crumbling, the roofs greening with moss, a no trespassing sign posted underneath towering firs.

[...] when Nestle, the Swiss transnational company, approached with a plan to build a water bottling plant from a local spring — plus a promise of 50 jobs and annual revenues of hundreds of thousands of dollars — town leaders jumped at it.

[...] the opposition — including residents, Native American tribes and orchard owners — has grown so fierce that the project landed on Oregon's May 17 primary ballot.

Measure 14-55 asks the voters of surrounding Hood River County to ban the commercial production and transport of bottled water.

The campaign has pitted neighbor against neighbor and demonstrates Cascade Locks' bigger dilemma of generating income without spoiling the jaw-dropping scenery that makes the place special.

Studies by the fish and wildlife department and one commissioned by Nestle say the hatchery won't be adversely affected, and that conditions will be virtually unchanged for wild salmon swimming in the Columbia that use Herman Creek Cove to cool off during hot weather.

In April, Orvie Danzuka, a leader of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, appeared before the Cascade Locks City Council and cited global warming, salmon die-offs and water conservation as reasons to reject the bottling plant.