Water speculators fishing for profit amid drought scare

"The board members from Lee County don't want to overpermit water to leave here and leave ourselves short," said Joe Cooper, general manager of the Lost Pines Groundwater Conservation District. "We're probably going to get sued from two directions some day. Either we turn someone down for a permit, and they sue us because we've been too scrupulous. Or one day when a well goes dry, we get sued by the landowner because we're too free with water."

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This story was published before the welcome cool fall temperatures arrived, and a bunch of rain later. It's another piece of important information for those of us who care about our own and our families' future water supply. This question cannot be left to bought politicians and water profiteers alone to decide for us. Lee County is just two counties away northeast from Hays.

By Asher Price
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Austin American-Statesman

Read the whole story at this link: http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/2009/09/14/0914water.html

Monday, September 14, 2009
LEXINGTON — In a scorching cow pasture silent save the lowing of cattle, Terry Gilmore picks up a stick and draws in the sand a simple map: divots in the ground for a handful of water wells, then a long scratch for a pipeline to deliver water to Austin's eastern flank.

About 2,000 feet below him sits an underground reservoir, known as the Simsboro formation, that he and others hope will fuel development everywhere from Georgetown to San Antonio.
Gilmore, 60, the chief investor in a water development company called Sustainable Water Resources, has spent millions of dollars to try to make his lines in the sand a brick-and-mortar reality.

Besides Gilmore, a handful of competitive water speculators are banking that the water beneath the largely rural area in Lee and surrounding counties is their crystal-clear gold. As anxieties about water supplies rise among the public and politicians, private speculators see an opportunity to tie up water rights and sell their goods to cities. But they have struggled to land big buyers.