Crystal Geyser pulls plug on Orland

The Crystal Geyser Water Co. announced Tuesday (Nov. 8) that it is giving up on efforts to build a water-bottling plant in Orland. In a letter to local residents, company Vice President Richard Weklych expressed the company’s disappointment and apologized to local supporters. He noted that nearly 200 Orland-area residents had applied for the 25 jobs the project expected to create.

He said “the open-ended nature of ongoing legal expenses” had forced the company to look elsewhere for a place to build a new facility. In August a Sacramento Superior Court judge ruled the Orland city government had not followed the state’s environmental-impact-report requirements when it approved the bottled-water plant in 2009. The plans called for a 112,000-square-foot building on County Road 20. That ruling came as the result of a lawsuit filed by two organization called Save Our Water Resources and Friends of Orland.