Citizens Filter Hermosa Beach City Council Water to Stop Waste & Force Change

On Monday I wrote about how some of my friends on the Hermosa Beach City Council had ignored citizen requests that they stop using disposable Arrowhead plastic water bottles as their source of drinking water at City Council meetings.  We had told them they were not only wasting money, water and resources – they were also setting a bad public example on television and on the web where their meetings are broadcast.

Mayor DiVirgilio,  Councilman Duclos  and Councilman Fishman had no problem bringing their own reusable water bottles and bypassing the wasteful water in throwaway bottles

But as you can see by the following photos I took at last night’s meeting Councilmen Tucker wasn’t on board…. Neither was Councilman Bobko… And as you saw at the top, neither were City Attorney Jenkins, or City Manager Burrell…

Having asked politely for months now and being ignored, our Fratelli Verde (Italian for Green Brothers) ad hoc group of Dency Nelson, Robert Fortunato and me took matters into our own hands and purchased two large Brita water filter pitchers and a year’s worth of replacement filters and gifted them to the City Council.

Dency did all the work, going to Costco to purchase the pitchers and the filters at retail and then prepping the filters and delivering them full of water to the Council dais at the meeting Tuesday night.

Dency also reminded the Council members from the podium of just how much money, water and fossil fuels the City was wasting with their use of disposable bottles of water that have to be trucked in and then trucked out of Hermosa Beach.

I took my turn at the podium as well to inform the Council members that one billion water bottles are disposed of every year in the USA and that 80% of them are NOT recycled and just wind up in landfills.

Now the question is – You can lead a City Council to the right water, but can you get them to drink it?

Tune into the next Hermosa Beach City Council meeting to see the answer and to find out who is just talking the talk and who is actually drinking the drink.