In a rural North Florida town where the water tower bears the motto ''Tiny but Proud,'' residents have a big secret: They give the cold, clear spring water that bubbles up from the aquifer below their soil to the nation's largest bottled-water company -- for free.

Every day, Nestlé Waters of North America sucks up an estimated 500,000 gallons from Madison Blue Springs, a limestone basin one mile north of town. It pipes the 70-degree water a mile to its massive bottling plant and distribution center, fills 102,000 plastic containers an hour, pastes on Deer Park or Zephyrhills labels, boxes it up and ships half of it out of state.

The cost to the company for the water: a one-time, $150 local water permit.

Like 22 other bottled-water companies in Florida, including giants Coca-Cola and Pepsi Co., Nestlé's profit is 10 to 100 times the cost of each bottle.

Payment to Florida? Not a dime.

Gov. Charlie Crist wants to change that. He is proposing a 6-cents-a-gallon state tax on water used for commercial water-bottling purposes.

''It's a resource of the state and if you're going to withdraw it for a profit, we should charge you for that use,'' said Mike Sole, secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, which has been developing Crist's proposal for six months.

The agency estimates the fee would apply to about 5.4 million gallons a day -- the amount it believes is pumped from state springs and aquifers by bottlers that include Coca-Cola's Dasani and Publix. The estimate does not include the water taken by bottlers from municipal water supplies.

The ''severance fee'' would be phased in to raise an estimated $56 million the first year, according to the governor's office. The money would be used to finance water projects, such as desalination plants and other alternatives to traditional water supplies. Making the money even more attractive: The fund that currently finances those projects faces a $15 million deficit since the tax dedicated to water projects dried up in the real-estate crash.

If the fee is passed on to consumers, the cost of a pint-size bottle of water would increase by less than a penny.

A SHIFT

It's a major shift in position for the department, prompted by Crist, which until December had collected no data on bottled-water use in Florida and takes a hands-off approach to its regulation. The Florida Department of Agriculture's Division of Food Safety makes sure bottlers have approval from local water-management districts to withdraw the water, but no state agency tests bottled water. Crist's proposal wouldn't change that.

Instead, Crist's plan would treat water like phosphate, oil or natural gas, all mined from the ground. Companies that extract those natural resources from which they profit pay fees or royalties to the state. Nestlé and other bottled-water users say it is unfair to single them out from all the public and private water users who extract what the Department of Environmental Protection estimates is four billion gallons of spring water from Florida's aquifers each day.

''I don't see how we're different from the agriculture users which, just a few miles from here, have 30 irrigation pivots draining more water than we are,'' said Rob Fisher, who runs the Blue Springs plant and is director of operations for Nestlé's southwest region.

Bottled water ''isn't a luxury, it's a choice,'' he argues, ``and during times of natural disaster, it's a necessity.''

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