Hedge-Fund Billionaire Wants To Tap East Texas Groundwater For Cities; Rural East Texas MAGA Residents Not Happy At All

Well, maybe if they called Trump "sir" with tears in their eyes? Big, strong farmers?

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In the hallway outside the boardroom, wives tried to cool their husbands with handheld paper fans that flapped uselessly amid a sea of silver hair — stoic men with sweat-slicked brows beneath weathered cowboy hats, veterans’ insignia, and red MAGA ball caps. Near the chamber door, a uniformed officer stood sweating through his shirt, trying to enforce the fire marshal’s 150-person limit while the crowd swelled behind him. The sign-in table, barely visible through the crush, had already collected nearly 100 names — almost all were there to speak out against the water permits requested by two shadowy LLCs tied to hedge fund manager Kyle Bass and his investment group, Conservation Equity Management Partners.

The permit applications submitted by Bass’ Redtown Ranch Holdings LLC and Pine Bliss LLC collectively request permission to withdraw approximately 15 billion gallons of water annually from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer in East Texas, an amount residents fear will run their wells and farms dry. Without taking off their “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirts, the citizens of six East Texas counties where Trump took around 80 percent of the vote last November are now turning to their state government to protect them from billionaires.

Jacksonville sits about two hours southeast of Dallas. With a population just shy of 15,000, it’s the largest city in Cherokee County, one of the three counties represented by the Neches & Trinity Valleys Groundwater Conservation District. The trees in the county are lush and tall, and the Neches and Trinity Rivers gently flood the landscape with a predictability that local farmers use to their advantage. The county’s tight-knit residents typically vote Republican, they’ve told me over the years, to protect their freedom from government overreach. But as they watch water conflicts breaking out all over Texas, they feel their communities are being overwhelmed by heavy industry and profiteering. Some locals have started making the case that it’s not government overreach for the state to step in when the fight’s not fair. Melisa Meador, who identified herself as a wife, mother, Christian, and pecan farmer with 600 acres near Bass’ Redtown Ranch — one of the LLCs looking to pump groundwater — took a prophetic tone in her testimony to the conservation district board. “Those who endlessly accumulate sow the seeds of their own destruction,” Meador said at the podium with the cadence and poetry of a revivalist. “Today’s water barons join river to river, well to well, until all water flows through their meters. Their thirst for profit can never be quenched.”

For his part, Bass feels he’s being mischaracterized. “I’m not coming at this as a robber baron, and I’m not coming at this as someone who intends to do any harm whatsoever,” he told me in the hall after taking a break from being public enemy number one inside the Jacksonville boardroom. “If they come back to me and say, ‘You’re going to do harm, you need to reduce your permit,’ I’m a very reasonable person.” He’s not shy about his intentions for the water, though he insists that he does not already have buyers lined up. The water, should he get it, could be transported out of East Texas to any number of bone-dry cities west of the Carrizo-Wilcox. Unless the government wants to hang a “closed-for-business sign on I-35,” he said, there has to be some solution to the statewide water shortage. Really, he said, the amount of water he’s talking about exporting is a drop in the bucket — less than 1 percent of what the state needs.

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https://grist.org/regulation/how-a-billionaires-plan-to-export-east-texas-groundwater-sparked-a-rural-uprising/