, which organized a first-of-its-kind deal to move Colorado River water from farms in western Arizona to a city near Phoenix. Both companies boast former Vidler executives in top leadership positions.
In this arrangement, the new breed of water brokers has found an opportunity to accumulate assets and generate profits. But the law requires them to tread cautiously. By acting as a broker for water rights, the PICO subsidiary that Hart called Vidler Water Company could get around the anti-speculation doctrine invoked in its very name. The tunnel engineer had sought to hold onto his water rights and make money by selling water to people who needed it. Vidler would just buy and sell the water rights themselves.
Armed with an infusion of cash from PICO, Timian-Palmer and a small group of Nevada-based lawyers and engineers set about flipping water. They bought agricultural water rights along a river in Colorado and sold them to Denver-area developers. They bought tens of thousands of acres of farm- and ranchland in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, and New Mexico and either sold the water rights to urban utilities, leased them back to farmers, or sold the land to developers.
“Vidler seeks to acquire water rights at prices consistent with their current use, with the expectation of an increase in value if the water right can be converted to a higher use,” the company said in a 2001 annual report. “Vidler’s priority is to develop recurring cash flow from these assets.” When Sandy Valley residents heard about the project, they were furious. The area’s aquifer was already overdrawn thanks to a number of irrigated farms nearby. Residents depended on shallow household wells for their water, and they were terrified that those wells would go dry if the state let Vidler take its share.
Timian-Palmer and her fellow executives saw that the West didn’t have enough water, and they knew that was good news for Vidler: As drought got worse, the company’s assets would only get more valuable. It could take years to secure regulatory approval for new groundwater pumping and even longer to build infrastructure to move that water around. Hart and Timian-Palmer were some of the only people in the West with the capital and expertise needed to pursue this kind of project.
Depending on whom you ask, this was either a boon for an impoverished rural county or a corporate takeover of a public resource. Wade Poulsen, the county employee who runs the water partnership, told Grist that Vidler had been “fantastic” and claimed that the county “would be nowhere without them.” But conservationists allege that Vidler was mining Lincoln County’s resources for profit.
He managed to build a golf course on the development site, but a regulatory battle subsequently derailed the project and Whittemore never used Vidler’s water. Whittemore’s green, which was designed by golf legend Jack Nicklaus, still stands by itself on an empty desert highway, flanked by a massive sign announcing the future site of Coyote Springs, which another company is still trying to push forward. A tortoise habitat sits just a few feet away.
It was a transaction only Timian-Palmer could have managed, and one that demonstrated Vidler’s clout on water issues: Getting permission to build the project required conducting multiple federal environmental reviews, placating officials in multiple states, negotiating with the nearby Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, and passing a bill to ratify the details in Congress.
That was in part because regulators had started to question the logic of growth. By the time the Western real estate market surged back to life in the late 2010s, the megadrought that gripped the region was well into its second decade. Major reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River were bottoming out, and many rural communities were starting to see their wells go dry.
By 2017, residents had taken Vidler to court in an attempt to stop the project. Several key executives had to take the stand, including Timian-Palmer and her longtime right-hand man, executive vice president Steve Hartman. During a series of testy depositions, it emerged that Vidler seemed to be stretching the truth about the “beneficial use” it planned for the water.
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