re: California's Water Problem - Privately Owned by Resnick Family for Profit

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City wide water systems might be one.

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Desal isn't a golden ticket. It is energy intensive and creates a highly concentrated salt solution that has to be deposed be either discharging into the ocean or injecting it into the ground.

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I knew the city that didn't refill their reservoirs, had no water pressure, had hundreds of stolen fire hydrants, didn't remove dry brush or conduct controlled burns, etc... would find a way to blame this on capitalism.

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I KNEW it was the jooooooooooooos!

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How did they get ownership of all of that? If it was by paying fair market value, then fine.

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While 40 million Californians suffer through unprecedented drought, one billionaire couple owns a massive share of the state’s water system, largely seized in a series of secretive meetings two decades ago.

That system was largely paid for by the very taxpayers whose water these billionaires hold hostage.

Urban water systems are desperate for water, but in 2023 they’ll receive just 5% of what they requested from the state. Stewart and Lydia Resnick use 150 billion gallons a year.

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The Resnicks are the biggest farmers in California–as of 2007 they owned four San Francisco’s worth of farmland.

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One important storage facility is the Kern Water Bank, started in 1988. The facility was built with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, which could’ve been a good thing: the people of California would’ve owned the water.

But there were two Californians thirstier than the rest, and they wanted more water: Lynda and Stewart Resnick, and they had a lot of political power

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In 1994 state water officials, water infrastructure contractors, and agricultural landowners with water rights arranged a secretive meeting at a resort in Monterey Bay California.

These groups, a mix of private companies and public agencies, rewrote California’s water laws without any input from voters, taxpayers, or legislators. The new laws, called The Monterey Plus Agreement or The Monterey Amendments were devastating for working Californians and great for agriculture billionaires.

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The original law had “urban preference” a long-standing rule that in times of drought the state water board would give urban areas–where people live–access to state water supplies before agricultural interests. Monterey axed that. That means that in times of drought the water systems for normal Californians would have to buy water from the private companies, because they weren’t getting it from the state.

The new agreement also loosened regulations on “paper water.” That’s water that doesn’t necessarily actually exist anywhere but on paper: the full quantities of water that providers could have, but don’t actually need to have. Today 5x as much water has been promised and sold as actually exists.

And importantly, the meeting changed ownership of the Kern Water Bank. What once belonged to the state was transferred to a few private water contractors. One of which was Westside Mutual, a wholly owned subsidiary of Wonderful Foods. The Wonderful employee who runs Westside, Bill Phillimore, is the chairman of the ‘public’ organization that manages the Kern Water Bank.

Boom. One secret meeting and the Resnicks owned nearly 60% of an important California water resource, built with hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money.

The new ownership combined with the rules on paper and surplus water meant that during times of drought the Resnicks could sell Kern water back to the state water systems.

They took Californian taxpayers’ water and sold it back to them– both literally as the water supply, and also to grow expensive food like gourmet pistachios and pomegranate juice. They converted the peoples’ water into products many can’t afford.

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But their favorite politician is Senator Diane Feinstein, chair of the Energy and Water subcommittee. She’s a close personal friend of the Resnicks, attending their holiday parties in Aspen and maintaining their financial interests.

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