The Stanwood spring that started a fight over who owns the water

In 2002 the first bottle rolled off the line at the Ice Mountain plant near Stanwood, and a quiet patch of Mecosta County woods turned into a national argument. The water inside came from Sanctuary Spring, pumped up from the ground at hundreds of gallons every minute and trucked to the bottling line. What stung many neighbors was the price: the company paid the state a flat fee of roughly $200 a year — about two dollars a week — for water it sold by the truckload.

The numbers were the easy part to grasp. Harder to see, and harder to argue, was what all that pumping did underground. Local residents formed Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation and took the company to court in 2001, saying the wells were drawing down Dead Stream and the wetlands fed by the same flow. They won the first round, and the pumping had to stop for a time. The company appealed, and in 2009 a judge settled on a smaller rate the operation could take.

The fight never really ended. When the company asked to pull even more — up to 400 gallons a minute, around 576,000 gallons a day — the state’s review drew a flood of public comment, nearly all of it against. The permit was approved anyway in 2018, and a later challenge was dismissed in 2020.

What makes the story stick is the gap between the two sides of the ledger. A multinational ships Michigan groundwater across the country, and the rent on the spring itself is less than a tank of gas. Out by the Dead Stream, you can stand on ground that looks like ordinary northern woods and know it sits over one of the most-argued aquifers in the state.