Review of Nestle water permit neglected for decades
desertsun.com
desertsun.com
>Gene Zimmerman, the forest supervisor who was in charge at the time, retired in 2005. He now does paid consulting work for Nestle.
>Zimmerman has said he doesn’t see any conflict in working for Nestle in his retirement.
I wonder if he sees any conflict working for Nestle before retirement.
Is it really so weird that a company would hire someone with intimate knowledge of a system in order to help navigate that system? This type of hiring occurs all the time, it literally has a name in the tech community - "acquihire". Do you find acquihires just as distasteful and filled with conflicts of interest?
Why do you doubt Zimmerman due to his current relation to Nestle but not Loe and Earney due to their current relation to the conservation movement? Surely, Zimmerman's position as forest supervisor actually makes him more credible than a biologist and a permit administrator?
The concern was that there was an implicit agreement that if the people with purchasing authority made sure that Microsoft products were pushed through, they would be able to retire early, draw their pension and also receive a salary from MS. Indeed, Corel once won a lawsuit showing that the Canadian government was making RFPs which specified that the software had to come from MS (which is against Canadian government policy).
Of course it makes considerable sense for companies to hire retired government insiders to help them with strategy and/or lobbying. There is no way to prove that there was any wrong doing while the person was a government employee. There are also no conflict of interest guidelines that can apply since the person is no longer a government employee.
It does, however, raise the question about whether or not the appointment is actually the payment on a bribe for services rendered. While such an allegation requires proof, it is important to stay alert to these kinds of things.
Considering there sometimes are in the tech industry clauses in contract that prevent an employee from working in another company active in the same field for X years, could such a clause be applied to government employees ? To prevent that kind of abuse. Could that legally be done (in Canada, eg) and would that be `fair' ?
Especially considering that the pensions can be thought of as a form of "gardening leave"[1]
Let's assume for just one minute that Nestle didn't pay an illegal bribe to Zimmerman (and/or other Gov officials) to forego/suspend the permitting review. Then what you are suggesting is that Nestle hired a former Govermnet employee they directly knew started working on a permitting review (already 15 years overdue on his watch) and continued this review for four years and then simply suspended the review without completion or even documenting why it was suspended. Then the very same company subject to the botched review immediately hires the Government employee they personally knew not only dropped the ball on the review but completely failed to document Why it was stopped...and do not forget the salient fact that the suspended review ultimately benefited the company.
In any other circumstance than funny business, the company would have never hired an employee they personally knew to be so incompetent as to completely stop working on a 4 year old permit review without either completing the review or documenting what happened.
I think most people would find an acquihire of public resources into private hands distasteful for obvious reasons. In the tech community the conflict of interest is the point, in the public sector its the problem.
The gist of it is this: we've come up with this notion (right or wrong) that we've created institutions that are somehow for the public good. It thus upsets us when they behave like institutions that operate like those that generate profit. Furthermore, one could argue that since all of government functions on the premise that it exists to serve its population, it gets certain lenience that the profit corporations do not: monopolistic protections and legal protections. That is to say, there are not multiple competing forest agencies, and not just coincidentally, but by design. So of course it is WORSE when the forest agency is "bought out": we don't even have the opportunity to make a competitor to keep it on its toes. In fact, these institutions are often protected from being sued.
where does our inherent trust to government come from? When I work with you I have to prove that I'm trustworthy. That happens either through working together or by you looking at my track record on github, mailing lists or whatever else.
Yet, when it comes to government officials no such thing applies. We trust them based on the fact that they supposedly work for government and therefore are supposedly trustworthy. But their track record generally shows the exact opposite.
And yet when I come home in a perfectly safe, good area of London, if I want something from my neighbour, I have to wait for her to open her 10 locks and open a tiny bit of the door to hear her ask what I want from her.
The only reason I see that speaks for them is the appeal to authority. We trust them, because we trust that an authority that has more power than we do is more trustworthy than us and by extension anyone appointed by them is as well.
No. Government positions are subject to various oversights. Much of the role of democratic forms of government are precisely that oversight. Though yes, it's quite often very imperfect.
Elections, FOIA requests, investigative journalism, lawsuits, review by other branches (e.g., state of county/municipal, federal of state/local), accounting/accountability offices (GAO for the US federal government), etc.
And removing government doesn't improve oversight.
The UK, on the other hand, seems to have a very ingrained (and, perhaps, inbred) centralization around authority. For a long period, it was even believed that the hereditary power structure was divinely appointed (maybe some still believe this?). So, there is this long history of accepting external authority over you and this has likely permeated the culture over the many centuries it has been developing.
I don't know enough about UK legal theories to know if the government is still actually structured as an external entity, but I sometimes get the impression that people feel that it is, based on their phraseology.
In the US, there is still a sense that the people make up the government and it can be changed as desired (though there is little consensus on desires), but I do hear people even in the US that speak of government like that (I may have done it on occasion myself).
It has nothing to do with the Government, but the sequence:
1- Company needs gatekeeper approval for a deal with some entity. 2- Gatekeeper approves deal on suspiciously very good terms for the company, bad terms for the entity, like paying 500 dollars fee for something they make millions. 3- The gatekeeper ends making millions on the company check.
...is part of corruption 101. While it happens all the time it is corruption. I have seen it myself too many times. I have seen people decide invading a country with huge benefits for some industry, then this industry hiring the guy on luxury terms.
The point is that this is a concern whenever you're moving from a place of privilege and trust to the person you were meant to be regulating (okay, it's not exactly regulating with audit). This is doubly so for government because of the extent of their power and potential for abuse. What are the laws regarding conflict of interest here? What's the waiting period for switching jobs? What reviews are done to ensure everything is above board? Because the article makes it sound as if there was no review and if there was, they'd have shown some fishy coincidences.
Hmm, no it's not. Because when Google, Microsoft or another acquihire a smaller fish they don't bribe one of the XO for years before (plus, the public administration don't disappear like the smaller fish does in an acquihire).
> Do you find acquihires just as distasteful and filled with conflicts of interest?
Aaaaand here comes the lauded question based on a suspicious analogy.
> Is it really so weird that a company would hire someone with intimate knowledge of a system in order to help navigate that system?
s/navigate/cheat
They are walking rolodex, that's what it is. And it's documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_%28politics%29
This is different, his actions/inactions in his public service directly affected his future employer in a beneficial way. Is it so weird that people would be distrustful in a situation like this? If there was no issue do you really think anybody would doubt he doesn't have a conflict of interest?
Well, it seems as if quid pro quo is standard practice in US politics.
Example: Chris Dodd works to put through some of the worst Copyright Laws and then goes on to work for the MPAA.
"The agency, however, has reassessed some other water permits in the national forest. In the mid-2000s, for instance, the Forest Service went through the permits of hundreds of cabins and reexamined their use of water from creeks. In Barton Flats, dozens of cabin owners were told they could no longer draw water from a creek and instead would have to use wells or install tanks and truck in water. Cabin owners spent thousands of dollars putting in tanks."
doesn't look like different treatment?
Notice how Zimmerman's integrity and past ethical performance of his job is called into question due to his current relationship to Nestle while Loe and Earney's integrity and past ethical performance of their jobs is not also questioned. How do we not know that Loe and Earney didn't attempt to sabotage Nestle's legal extraction of groundwater as quid pro quo for a post-retirement gig as an activist?
Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?
P(quid pro quo | quid∧quo)
>
P(quid pro quo | ¬quid∨¬quo)
As to your question about who might be paying Loe and Earney, well, we don't know. We don't know that they're being paid at all, and there isn't anything anomalous about a biologist calling for environmental review. Conversely, we know Zimmerman is being paid, and we know that there were anomalies in the permit review process. So that objection basically boils down to, "If we suspect foul play in this one situation, why don't we suspect it in this completely different situation where the facts are not analogous." Well . . .
Go on, find an example of someone becoming a paid activist after retiring from a government gatekeeping position. Note that "activist" often means "unpaid".
It comes from the fact that until two years before he was hired this permit review, by his department, of Nestle's resource-extraction operation was kept in a state of suspended animation. That's where the distrust comes from.
Honestly? Yes.
Acquihiring itself seems like a reasonable approach to hiring, just as hiring someone who knows a particular domain through their service in public office. But both also create perverse incentives. Politicians often try to gain favours with their potential future employer while still in office, thus serving two masters with conflicting interests. And more and more startups are created with the goal and expectation of being acquihired - which means that their product is a lie. As a customer I don't want (and will refuse to give my money to) a company to bullshit me about how "their users are important to them" and how "their service is a product of love", only to shut it down at a moment's notice as planned from day one (and to add insult to injury, sending an e-mail about how "we founders want to thank you for being with us" while having drinks at a beach, because "this is a success of all of us, we couldn't do that without you").
That is totally different than what is happening here, where a government employee gives preferential treatment to a business entity that he or she is supposed to regulate and keep in check in the hopes that he or she will be hired by them after they leave their government post. It's a clear conflict of interest.
While I'm skeptical of Zimmerman's actions here, and am inclined to believe that there is apparent corruption, that does not mitigate that corruption has not been shown to be apparent... yet.
It's neither impossible nor unlikely that there are dozens of other companies working with similarly expired licenses, or under similar states of neglect.
(Note, this is speculative. I don't honestly even know if the forest service has any others extracting water from them, so I could be totally off-base, but as bad as this looks, it's worth reserving judgement for something less circumstantial.)
1) Surely it is not a big deal if a retired army general is hired by the Chinese military to advise on warfare and machinery.
2) Surely it is not a big deal if the CIO at Google is hired by the Russian, or Senegalese (to be fair) government to consult on information architecture for their systems.
3) Surely after Obama retires, it is not a big deal for him to consult for Iran, and North Korea on how to develop a better relationship with the West.
When you have taken a role in office, you simply cannot go work for the type of companies you were regulating in the first place. You could be the most honest person on earth, but we just have your word for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
The principal–agent problem (also known as agency dilemma or theory of agency) occurs when one person or entity (the "agent") is able to make decisions on behalf of, or that impact, another person or entity: the "principal". The dilemma exists because sometimes the agent is motivated to act in his own best interests rather than those of the principal. The agent-principal relationship is a useful analytic tool in political science and economics, but may also apply to other areas.
Or do you not want experts to ever work for government?
Those are the outcomes I see if you start making a lot of rules about what government employees can do next.
1. Didn't perform a mandatory permit review for 15 years;
2. Started 15 year old over due review and worked on it for 4 years and just simply stopped without documenting why the review was stop;
3. Thereafter almost immediately took a job with the company who benefited from this incompetence (apparently under the guise Zimmerman rather than being totally incompetent is an expert); and
4. When finally questioned about why the delay, why the lack of documentation...simply answers I was busy fighting forest fires.
In short, You are goddamn right I want "rules" for accountability.
You may say I am making a large assumption about that as well, except it is evidenced by the fact he began the review (15 years late) and worked on it for 4 years.
I further guess what you are saying is Government employees despite having job responsibilities and duties should have complete and total independent discretion as to what their time is best spent doing...makes sense they are the experts after all.
>do you not want experts to ever work for government?
Do you think the government can't offer anything? Give someone a free education and pay them well. It doesn't matter if they can't work in the industry afterward; let them retire and live off their retirement.
This is just one option among many. Corruption is a hard problem, but it doesn't do any good at all to pretend it can't be effectively mitigated.
If not, why not?
But to answer your question: yes. If the pay, benefits, and opportunities were attractive enough, I would.
Which raises all kinds of practical concerns. What if you study and love a particular field, start working for the government, but can't stand working for the government once you get there? What if the government downsizes and eliminates your position? What if you want to move someplace for family or other personal reasons and can't take your gov't job with you? What if you get fired?
This really sounds like you're trying to engage in an ungenerous argument. Don't try to nitpick everything I didn't say as though you don't have enough brains to think it through yourself. Instead of trying to win an argument, you should focus on addressing the problem.
Because, again, saying that we should just accept corruption as unavoidable is about the most abhorrent political position one could take.
I specifically want experts working in government, not lifetime bureaucrats. IMO, that demands a rotation of experts into and out of government service, because in many fields your expertise and relevance will atrophy meaningfully in just a handful of years. I want the White House CTO to have genuine, relevant (read: recent) industry expertise. I want the head of the FDA to have genuine scientific background and credentials. I want the head of the SEC to have Wall St/other finance/trading expertise.
I think we end up with more problems having career politicians and all the associated perturbed incentives that that brings than we have from the frequent appearance (and occasional reality) of corruption as players cycle from industry/business to government posts and back.
I further believe that most of us get the highest performance from on-going focus in a relatively narrow field and applying oneself in the same field (especially if you have interest and passion) is good for the person and good for society.
I genuinely read your original comment to be suggesting a lifetime of work in government with no possibility to return to the private sector in an industry position related to your government post. My apologies if you meant something else than what I inferred, but my reading and reaction was genuine. I'm sorry you felt nitpicked over it.
(I also believe that, given the need for relevant expertise in government that some amount of corruption is an inevitable byproduct, more than offset by the benefits we get from not having career book-learners (or worse, politically favored know-nothings) in positions of such power. We need to deal with that corruption as we find it, and create large disincentives for proven corruption, but some amount is unavoidable in a system that employs tens of millions of flawed humans in positions of power.)
Has anybody said this during this discussion?
For example, let's say a Nestle competitor that doesn't have any stakes in that particular area of influence of said gov. official, then there's no issue.
I know this would be hard to put in practice, but then again, the benefits should be enough right?
I'd rather have a "stooge" as HN and reddit called Tom Wheeler for a very long time at the FCC, than some random idiot who, say, watches Fox News all day or reads HuffPost all day and completely lacks any sophistication in how government works.
The very same people who want outsiders also don't understand why third party candidates they often support end up being racists or fascists or communists. There's real value in the mainstream - that's why its the mainstream. I wish more young people understood that.
It is quite simple. It comes from looking at the concerned incentives.
Wait, you mean the guy who was in charge when the permit review died of inattention?
I have no problem with skilled government employees taking jobs at a private company as long as the company they're working for could not have benefited from regulations they administrated.
I don't think the acquihire analogy is relevant is this situation.
His position means he was in a place of authority to effect actions on behalf of the government that would have direct financial consequence for a company he now consults for.
Trust but verify.
In the verification process it is identified that justification for abandoning two separate permit reviews was never provided. That's weird, so speculation ensues.
System of what? System of neglecting their jobs?
>"acquihire"
"Regulatory capture"? And I don't think(or at leas hope it wasn't) that San Bernardino National Forest was bought by Nestle.
Acquihire is not automatically a good thing, Stephen Elop was also "acquihired"...
The term for that would be 'hacking into the system through hiring'. 'Acquihire' would be Nestle acquiring the entire government (or at least that division of govt), which cannot happen.
Nothing indicates why? It's not like they'd write down: "Got bribed. Stopped permit review."
From reading the article, I noted a few things:
The forest employees did reject demands for expansion multiple times. They care about their forest (of course).
These people love and protect the environment. If Nestlé was destroying it, they wouldn't let it happen.
If it was easy to re-evaluate a license in a proper way, they would do it (they did for smaller installations). They seem to lack the resources to do a proper licensence evaluation at that scale.
Maybe Nestlé is hiring people with life-long experience protecting the nature because they are good at it ?
Perhaps not actively evil, but maybe amoral?
Some people do things others consider bad not explicitly to be evil or for personal gain but because they "don't see the problem so why not?" or because they are focused on other priorities and are either simply unaware or consider the problem(s) being caused elsewhere to be worth a movement toward some "greater good" by there assessment of good.
It happens in politics all the time: things like "we'll never get X to agree to Y so we'll have to let that slip even though we are vehemently against it, but if we do let that slip (despite the resulting anger back home) we'll probably get them to agree to Z which otherwise they never would and that is a big bonus". That is a very active and large scale example, but people make similar rationalisations on a smaller scale day-in-day-out, sometimes almost completely subconsciously.
Do you honnestly think this guy is actually burning trees, laughing in a jaccuzy full of dollar bills ?
Joke aside, they hired this guy because they need environment experts, which is a step in the right direction cause it means they start to care.
On a different topic, if the water licensing does not provide enough resources for a proper re-evaluate, then there is something fundamentally wrong
Thats basically why they hire people who have these skills.
The lack of license re-evaluation resources is sad and tells alot about how much some govs actually care about the environement.
Strangely nobody would care about nature if oil was flowing in these pipes.
That doesn't mean corruption and regulatory capture aren't issues, but they aren't a complete (or even major) part of the problem.
I guess also it doesn't bother me too much if drinking water is being extracted from a national forest as these forests are required by statute to be managed for multiple uses including resource extraction. Relatively speaking, siphoning off water for drinking seems like it is likely to be a relatively low impact activity, even when it's a bigevilcorporation like Nestle who is doing the extraction.
Of course, as the California Golf Course Superintendents Association is quick to point out, parks and golf courses combined use up only 1% of potable water in California. They like to point the fingers at almond growers, which consume about a gallon per nut. Almond growers note that an ounce of lentils takes 71 gallons, and an ounce of beef 106 gallons. Farmers in general blame housing. And so on.
Vanity fair did a somewhat amusing chart about the blame game: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/04/california-drought...
(Note: Take all the numbers with a grain of salt; they're self-serving press releases, if not outright lies. Even so, it's pretty clear Nestle's not to blame for California's water problems; whether their usage is the 0.008% of total California water use the company claims or, hell, ten times that, it's not a big deal.)
Farmers in general are talking out of the wrong end of their trousers.
(Overall, bottled water is a kind of waste, but not really the worst you can find.)
The total amount of work encompassed many areas, and as such was a long, expensive project (to my standards, but not necessarily for government work) -- I think the project was slated to take approximately five years and cost approximately $50 million.
Despite incessant changes, we were closing in on finishing the project on time and on budget, but in year 4, the project was scrapped (after having spent the majority of the money) because nobody had planned on how to fund it in year 6, and the organization decided that instead of spending the remaining money going through the motions, they'd just pocket what was left over and apply it to their operating budget, which was (naturally) under-funded.
We built a smallish data center, procured water-proof routers, cameras, built websites and data processing workflows, all on the assumption that at the end of year 5, they'd actually USE the things we built and bought for them. Turns out, that was naive.
So they can't simply say "hold off until we check this out", because that's illegal; the permit is valid until they process the renewal. Nor could they simply deny out of hand every application they don't have resources to review; that would also be illegal.
The real answer would be to overhaul the entire system, streamline it, and see that it has proper funding (probably via some hefty application fees). But that's not going to happen any time soon.
(See also: Every other god damn branch of government. Although the patent office is experiencing an especially similar issue.)
Remembering its a review of the permit to decide whether they can continue, not a cessation of operations. The only reason that Nestle haven't taken the regulator to court at the moment is that the review process failed open allowing business to continue. If they voluntarily close it and take forever to complete the review, Nestle has grounds for compensation on the waiting time.
The USFS is getting not sued out of the current arrangement and continued barebones operations, thats about it. :/
NAFTA says that once bulk sales of water begin it that's it Pandora's Box can't be shut.
People in BC and Canada are worried if Nestle is charge even a small amount that will be seen as a bulk sale of water and then that's it game over the US will demand we sell water to the dry western states.
Sure it isn't exporting it but it is the sale of water to a corporation and it is the water not the service to deliver the water, but that all may be step one to exporting it.
nobody cares or win elections with water rights. so it's very cheap to lobby that area. nobody cares!
this excuse about the mass sale is nonsense. several countries have limits on number of wells someone/company can have and limits on water extraction. it's freaking simple.
Our government in turn setup a deal where nestle pays $2.25 CAD per million litres of water they extract starting in 2016.
They took 265 million litres last year, what a farce, they will only by charged about 600$ a year at the new price... Better than nothing but still... I pay out of my ass for water.
Nestle in turn sells bottled water for about $1 to $3 per litre...
Recent article on the matter: http://www.cbc.ca/m/news/canada/british-columbia/nestlé-b-c-...
You pay for treated water. If you dig a hole in the ground you'll get untreated water for free.
By the way, if you don't like it, you can always join the winning team and buy Nestle stock.
Our reservoirs are also chronically below target levels and several farmers have had their crops ruined because of it.
The watershed where Nestle gets its water (Hope) is currently in stage 4. It's completely banned to water any lawn, field, park area, etc. Any non-hand watering of a garden is also completely banned.
Separately, you aren't going to make much progress with people if you go around appealing to vague and abstract principles in a way that is disconnected from their values.
That said, you're probably right that they're sending down a negligible amount of water, especially compared to what the water agencies up there pump locally or even compared to the declining water levels of the lakes in Arrowhead and Big Bear
It's pretty obviously a combination of apathy and corruption.
1) 'Quid pro quo' is a lot harder than it seems- it requires Zimmerman to commit a crime, then trust that Nestle will take care of him after. This is pretty rare.
2) Zimmerman does have value to Nestle, though, in the form of knowledge of USFS processes, like the renewal process. If he weren't hired by Nestle I'm sure he would be hired by another company for this knowledge.
3) If any corruption did occur, it was probably in the form of one of Nestle's senators tapping the shoulder of the director of the USFS, leading to direct or indirect pressure to not review the permits. This could be very subtle (i.e. budget is cut, word comes down from on high that something else is highest priority, and if it ain't broke don't fix it).
> Gene Zimmerman, the forest supervisor who was in charge at the time, retired in 2005. He now does paid consulting work for Nestle.
Also, pulling water out of a desert watershed, trucking it up to Canada, to ship it back down to the US to sell in little plastic bottles is the height of corporate capitalist insanity.
Almost like an engineering problem where you want to ensure no one process overwhelms all others.
wait, let me get this straight: a pipe runs from the top of the San Bernardio mountains carying moutain spring water to tanks below where it's transported for bottling?!?!?!
(joke/sarcasm) That line is pasted like 5 or 6 times as the tagline for most the images in the article. Talk about repetitive!
My boycott is difficult not just because I enjoy many Nestle products but because it is not always easy to determine what products Nestle actually makes. I have learned to read product labels very very carefully.
Many fine foods and beverages that were once prepared by other, independent businesses that are now Nestle subsidiaries. Even if Nestle does not own the manufacture it distributes their products.
Just for grins, read the ingredients from a few Nestle foods soldin the United States, fly to Geneva then read the ingredients of their Swiss products. One of the greatest scams in all of human history resulted in American children drinking nonfat milk.
Here in Vancouver I drink "Swiss Chocolate Milk", made in the United States b Alpenrose with whole milk.
For a parent to feed their children nonfat milk is child abuse.
From this article (http://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/24/nestle-chairman-time-to-turn-...): --- "Water is a human right. I fully agree with that," Brabeck-Letmathe said, noting that the around 30 liters a day needed for basic living should be provided without charge to those who can't afford it. But that amount is only accounts for around 1.5 percent of the fresh water destroyed daily, he said.
He's more concerned about the other 98.5 percent. "I don't think it's a human right to fill up a swimming pool. I don't think it's a human right to wash cars. I don't think it's a human right to water a golf course," he said. ---
How do you feel about that quote now?
Than you for pointing out my error; sometimes, what one reads on Facebook may not really be true.
However that does not imply that I should stop Boycotting Nestle products. There are many other good reasons that I will explain but not just now as I am posting from my iPad.
I will post my explanation at http://www.warplife.com/mdc/essays but my consultancy is on fire so It will be a little while.
I have a cast iron stomach, the only time I have ever gotten really serious food poisoning was from the Apple Computer employee lunchroom.