The news that Montana Artesian Water Company is bottling and selling water locally should send waves of anger through the citizens of this county. After a resounding 70 percent victory in the June 5 election, this bottling operation was prohibited from operating in the Egan Slough Zone. Based on the vote of the people it is incumbent on the county commissioners to enforce this mandate and put a stop to this. But what have these elected officials done? They have thumbed their noses at the people who pay their salaries. The commissioners have sat on taking any action thus allowing MAWC to keep going after this vote and to start bottling. Even though the planning department visited Lew Weaver’s operation in July and found that no bottling had occurred they surely must have been overruled by the commissioners who further allowed a health department license to take effect. There is no valid ground to grandfather in an existing operation at the time of the vote because there was no operation going then. The commissioners have apparently prevailed on the county attorneys office to take no action to enforce our legally valid initiative vote. Instead the commissioners have hired a Missoula law firm to “advise” them. And this is at taxpayer expense! This is not rocket science that takes weeks and weeks of legal thought. If the county attorneys cannot represent the people of this county, and not the commissioners and their questionable biases, then they need to be replaced along with the commissioners. It has been crystal clear from the beginning of this controversy that the commissioners were totally supportive of Weaver’s operational plans despite their statements that they wanted to hear nothing about it. Facts suggest otherwise. If MAWC is now, through its PR voice, questioning the validity of the vote and whether an initiative can be enforced, wouldn’t you think that the election department would have considered this issue before approving the initiative for the ballot. The county attorney’s office approved the ballot resolution, but now they sit by and do nothing. The commissioners had almost a year to have this issue legally addressed even prior to the vote on June 5. The county itself delayed the vote for almost a year.
This arrogance of power should be challenged and I encourage all 17,000 plus voters who voted to stop this operation to speak out and take action to protect the will of the people.
David Eychner
Kalispell