A Dallas Investor Bought 11,000 Acres in East Texas. He Wants the Water Underneath It.
Anderson County Judge Carey McKinney found out about it at church. A deacon asked him the Sunday before Memorial Day if he’d seen a groundwater permit application published in the local paper. McKinney went home and pulled the week-old newspaper off his kitchen counter. That’s how the highest elected official in the county learned that a Dallas hedge fund manager wanted to pump 10 billion gallons of groundwater a year out from under his community, roughly three times what the entire county uses annually, and pipe it somewhere else. ...