S.F. markets its tap water at $1.29 a bottle

Oakland Tribune, Mar 27, 2003 by Jill Tucker, STAFF WRITER

There's a tourist born every minute.

And for 31,000 of them, there's a $1.25 half-liter bottle of Hetch Hetchy Mountain Water waiting for them, courtesy of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which launched the product Tuesday.

Never mind that it's basically the same stuff running out Bay Area taps and flushing the toilets.

Telling tourists that could really ruin the calming effect from the serene mountain image on the bottle's pretty label.

Instead, let them soak in the clean mountain water, collected from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park and trucked to a bottling plant in Roseville, where it is micron-filtered and treated with ozone prior to bottling to comply with federal regulations.

That's surely worth a buck and change over the free unfiltered stuff that flows through 167 miles of tunnels and pipes before getting treated and sent to 2 million local taps.

"It tastes really, really good," said Beverly Hennessey, communications director for the San Francisco PUC, of the bottled stuff. "It's a great promotional opportunity for the city."

Producing bottled water from the public water source is a relatively novel and "quirky" idea, Hennessey acknowledged.

And it could generate some income, which would filter -- no pun intended -- back into PUC projects.

The initial batch of the bottled stuff is available in four San Francisco locations, including City Stores in City Hall, Pier 45, the Beach Chalet and at the PUC Customer Service Bureau.

The free stuff -- blended with a 15 percent portion of water from local watersheds -- is available to 770,000 San Franciscans as well as 90 percent of San Mateo residents and those in Hayward, Fremont, Union City, Newark and San Jose.

On Tuesday, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was first at the City Store to buy a bottle of the trademarked city water.

Contact Jill Tucker at jtucker@angnewspapers.com .