Water fills Mount Shasta council's agenda

Mount Shasta officials are considering whether to outlaw water bottling plants in the city and cloud seeding over its watersheds.

“This would be the first type of ordinance in California of its kind,” said Kevin Plett, Mount Shasta city manager.

The City Council is set today to decide whether to put the proposed law on the November ballot.

A residents group, the Mount Shasta Community Rights Project, collected signatures from more than one-third of Mount Shasta’s more than 2,000 voters and presented the proposed law to the council.

“Water is a public resource, and it should be up to the public to decide how it’s used,” said Angelina Cook, a Mount Shasta resident who is part of the Mount Shasta Community Rights Project.

According to the group’s Facebook page, the ordinance would:

•Prohibit water bottling corporations from bulk water withdrawal within the city.

•Prohibit corporations from cloud seeding within the city.

Plett said the ban on cloud seeding, or the adding of substances to storms in an effort to produce more precipitation, would extend to the watersheds around the mountain town in Siskiyou County.

In drafting a 98-page citizens report about the ordinance, the group received help from a pair of nonprofit organizations, the San Francisco-based Global Exchange and the Pennsylvania-based Community Legal Defense Fund.

The group is set to present the report to the council today.

In a memo sent to the city council Friday, Mount Shasta City Attorney John Kenny said the ordinance is “not carefully drafted.”

“The ordinance is broad, multifaceted and extraordinarily ambitious in scope,” he wrote. “It attempts to create new rights, new liabilities and new authority in the city to regulate matters already regulated by state and federal law.”