Dana Dining Hall pays Frontenac Crystal Springs to provide patrons with an alternative source of water apart from treated village tap water and to support a local business. Dana pays Frontenac about $.75 per gallon of water and purchases roughly 200 gallons a week, 800 gallons a month and 3,600 gallons a semester. Water from Frontenac costs Dana $150 a week, $600 a month, and $2,700 a semester. The same 3,600 gallons a semester at the Village of Canton water rate of $5.70 per 1,000 gallons would result in cost of $20.52 a semester, a 131-time reduction in price and a savings of over $2,500.
“There are students who don’t want to drink treated water,” said Dana Dining Hall Manager Bob Zimmerman. They have requested alternatives other than water from the village, he added. Tap water is treated and “the process at the treatment plant includes pH adjustment, chemical addition, mixing, flocculation, settling, filtration, and the addition of chlorine,” according to the Village of Canton Annual Village Water Quality Report in 2015. “More and more people being aware of what they are drinking, the Flint water crisis, being aware of the by-products of the chlorination process and not wanting to play a numbers game between their short term and long term health,” said Pete Colello, a representative from Frontenac.
Despite student concern over drinking treated tap water both local and federal government regulatory agencies agree that the Village of Canton has safe drinking water. The 2015 Village of Canton Annual Drinking Water Report reported zero contaminant violations. Information gathered from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) reported no health, monitoring or reporting violations in the last 10 years for the Village of Canton.
Frontenac has had a contract with St. Lawrence for many years and is local to the North Country, based in Clayton, N.Y. St. Lawrence balanced between the push for sustainability and a continued commitment to the local area. “Even when they kind of wanted to ban the bottled water, we were such a large part of their business plan that we didn’t want to weed it out entirely,” said Zimmerman.
Although not as cheap as village water, St. Lawrence lowers costs when they buy locally from Frontenac. “Because the product is so heavy, it makes sense to buy as close to the source as possible,” said Colello. Buying local helps minimize the expensive transactional costs of moving bottled water.