POLAND — Spurred by strong sales, Poland Spring is looking for two additional spring sites and a home for its fourth bottling plant in Maine, a $50 million construction project.

The company bottled nearly 902 million gallons of water in the state last year. The new trio of projects could give it capacity for 400 million more.

The brand is the No. 1-selling bottled spring water in the U.S.

Mark Dubois, a Poland Spring geologist and natural resource manager, said it’s broadly eyeing areas around Fryeburg, Rumford and northeast of Bangor for the bottling plant with very specific criteria: 60 to 120 acres, a flat grade, on a state highway and, ideally, near a railroad.

Water below has to be fast-flowing and taste like Poland Spring and the two new spring sites feeding the plant should be within an hour’s drive of the plant.

“The growth in the health and wellness trends are really what’s driving it,” Dubois said. “(Bottled water) did surpass soda in volume of products sold (in 2016) and it really sets us up to start looking in that three- to five-year time frame. It takes a long time to locate a factory and a region that will work well for the company, so we’re going to start that siting process now.”

Fully built out, it could mean 80-plus jobs paying an average of $20 an hour for the new host community and will almost certainly renew debate over how much water the company is withdrawing in Maine.

The new effort is separate from its ongoing work to site a new spring in Rumford that could draw 100 million-plus gallons a year.

Nickie Sekera, a Fryeburg Water District trustee and co-founder of Community Water Justice, which opposed Poland Spring’s long-term contract in Fryeburg, said she wasn’t surprised at the news, given Poland Spring’s fevered marketing push.

She agreed with Dubois that Maine is a water-rich state, but said it’s a matter of getting the most value for it locally as well as protecting it for the future. Sekera anticipated community pushback as the company looks for sites.

“When resources bypass the full benefit of local people wholesale for the benefit of multinational corporations, we create a situation on the ground where money is funneled up and out,” she said. “Maine, with our water, it’s something to be very cautious about how we move forward and who gains control over our water and how we can always be sure that local people will come first.”

Poland Spring, whose parent company Nestle, headquartered in Switzerland, is among the largest public companies in the world, has nine springs in the state, largely in Western Maine. It employed 900 people at peak last summer, and has bottling plants in Poland, Hollis and Kingfield.

“It’s been the perfect factory for us,” Dubois said of Kingfield, which is the newest, opening in 2009. “It’s actually highly efficient. We haven’t grown since the Kingfield factory; it does come in spurts. We’re clearly out of the recession now and it’s time to start growing again.”

Poland Spring has been in Fryeburg for 18 years and knows its aquifers well, he said. The company has had test wells in Rumford for more than a year exploring an aquifer that supplies the town’s drinking water.

Northeast of Bangor is more of an unknown, Dubois said, but a candidate because of its access to rail.

Water would be drawn from both an “anchor spring” under the new bottling plant and from two new springs close enough that water would either be trucked or moved to the plant by pipeline.

The anchor spring must have the capacity for 200 million gallons or more annually, the two smaller springs up to 150 million, but how much is drawn out would depend on permits, flow and demand, Dubois said.

He said the new project may involve several communities working together: a bottling plant in one town, a pipeline running in from another town, a loading station in a third.

Poland Spring hopes to have test wells in this summer and to name a location by the end of 2017.

With a site in hand and locals on board, state and local permitting is expected to take a year.

“If you don’t have really good regional community partnerships, it makes it a hard project to continue on,” Dubois said. “So you need to have people that are really like-minded, that want to have economic development, want to bring manufacturing back into Maine into some of these areas that have lost manufacturing jobs.”

Depending upon how quickly the supporting springs come on, the factory may start with just two lines and 40 to 50 employees, he said.

Stakeholder meetings will start this month. Dubois will speak at the Auburn-Lewiston Rotary Breakfast Club about Poland Spring’s plans on March 8.

The current Rumford site at Milligan Well isn’t a contender for an anchor spring, but “the rate that we’re growing, I think we’re going to need future factories and bottling locations, as well,” Dubois said. “If it’s not this next factory, maybe it’s the one after that five years later.”

He said the company expects vocal opponents, “but I think when you consider the facts, that we’re reducing sugar in the American diet, we’re growing a healthy product, we’re exporting Maine values — when you look at that as a whole, I think it’s a really good win-win for these rural areas in Maine.”

Kerri Arsenault, a Mexico native who lives in Connecticut and is writing a book about Rumford, helped found the Western Maine Water Alliance last summer to oppose the Poland Spring plans. She’s no longer active with the group but said Wednesday that Rumford could use jobs, but not these jobs.

“I think (Poland Spring) takes advantage of disenfranchised towns,” Arsenault said. “They can say they care and they can say they’re going to do all this stuff for the community. In my experience and in the book I’m writing, too, big companies are very detached from the towns they’re in now. It’s not like the olden days when the person who owned the company lived in the town.”

kskelton@sunjournal.com 

This story was updated Friday to reflect the accurate number of gallons withdrawn in the state last year.

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