SEATTLE -- It's been more than a year since Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels made national headlines declaring a crackdown on city purchases of bottled water.

Our investigative team decided to check up on that promise and ran into a political firestorm.

Not only did bottled water keep coming to city offices, but KIRO Team 7 Investigative Reporter Chris Halsne discovered taxpayers are footing additional costs to implement the mayor's pet project.

Here are Mayor Nickels' exact words, captured on TV, spoken at a press conference in early 2008. See video

"In March, I ordered every department to stop buying water to cut down on waste and climate pollution and to save money," the mayor said.

However, behind the scenes his proclamation was filled with loopholes, delays, and around $100,000 (so far) in hidden costs.

Mayor Greg Nickels calls our tap water "pure as snow," yet if these receipts are any indication, city employees like to see the bottled water deliveryman.

Records reviewed by KIRO Team 7 Investigators show Seattle city departments bought around $55,000 in bottled water in the 12 months following Nickels public edict. That's a slight reduction from 2007 figures, but voters we spoke with hardly consider it a ban.

“Wow. That's why the budgets need to be cut now,” said one voter.

"Maybe they thought they had more money than they really had?"

"That sounds a lot like the norm for city government."

Press Secretary and Senior Policy Advisor, Alex Fryer, is speaking for the Mayor on this issue. Nickels repeatedly declined our interview requests.

Fryer clarified that the mayor never promised to end bottled water purchases overnight, telling Halsne, "It wasn't a blanket, but it was saying (on) the big contracts, we're not going to be doing those. We are going to work through that process."

Halsne followed up by telling Fryer, "But the mayor's statement itself sounded more definitive than that."

Nickels' staff thinks it’s unfair of us to start the water-ban time clock on the day his honor publicly announced the program.

The official executive order didn't really go into effect until eight months later, on Dec. 31, 2008.

After we asked, the city crunched some numbers and now estimates bottled water purchases to fall 68% during 2009.

Fryer says some employees and departments will keep getting bottled water if there is no good alternative.

“There are exceptions to that policy. There are some issues with getting our water quality up to where it should be.”

Speaking of that, Team 7 Investigators found some very real costs associated with reducing bottled water around city offices.

Under the Washington Open Records Act, we acquired and reviewed hundreds of memos, purchase orders, and invoices trying to track how much the Mayor’s bottled water edict cost taxpayers.

The city has never done so.

We're still compiling the list of plumbing upgrades, so far price totals add up to around $100,000.

A few examples of bills include:

$22,546 dollars worth of new bottomless water coolers at the Seattle Center.

$12,954 in water quality testing necessary to "insure (Parks) facilities were ready to implement the Mayoral decree."

$4,771 for plumbing supplies at Seattle City Light

$16,070 in-house labor to install plumbing supplies at the Seattle Center

Filters, water piping connections, cup holders, the receipts go on and on.

James Donaldson is running for mayor against Nickels.

“It's not really about the money. It's the principal of the thing. When you come out and make a proclamation to do one thing, then go out and do another thing and add a bunch of hidden costs to it - just to circumvent the image you're putting out there- that's wrong. That's just not acceptable," Donaldson said.

Bottled water usage by city employees recently started dropping, but kicking the habit was hard for some. The Information Technologies division had about 2,000 gallons delivered in the first four months of 2009. After we started asking questions, the IT department last month canceled its bottled water deliveries for the remainder of the year.

Finally, if there’s any image that represents just how difficult it may be to get all city employees to drink plain, old, sink tap water, it's this one.

We shot video inside the Human Services Department break room on the 58th floor of the fully plumbed Seattle Municipal Building. There is a perfectly good faucet , full of that "pure as snow" water, right next to a filtered water dispenser.

Going back to that press conference last year, we also discovered that the huge pile of individual plastic water bottles behind the mayor was a bit misleading.

The city only tracks expenses associated with 5-gallon bottles set on top of water dispensers. It has never added up what the city spends on those familiar, smaller, 16- and 20-ounce bottles.

The Mayor’s office tells Team 7 Investigators our figures related to improvement costs of implementing the bottled water reduction "seem high", but offered no verifiable alternative. The city admits nobody has ever tracked the costs until now.