A case study in public-private partnerships that transfer community resources to private developers while forcing existing residents to subsidize the arrangement.
The Infrastructure Cost Allocation
Prescott residents face rising water bills to pay for infrastructure they can’t use, while developers get guaranteed water for their projects. The Big Chino Water Ranch project, with costs now exceeding $261 million [1], splits expenses in a revealing way: twenty percent gets charged to existing residents through higher utility bills, while eighty percent falls to new home buyers through impact fees and infrastructure costs built into home sales [2]. The profit value of being able to develop thousands of tracts goes entirely to the developers.
This cost structure creates a fundamental unfairness. Existing residents pay approximately $52 million for infrastructure that actually limits community-wide water access while enabling massive private development. New residents pay market home prices that include the value of guaranteed water access funded by public infrastructure investment. Developers capture the increased land values created by public water allocation while recovering infrastructure costs through development sales.
Arizona Eco Development receives water allocation sufficient for 850 homes plus resort development, while all other development in Prescott receives limited annual allocations. The numbers reveal the wealth transfer: one private developer receives substantially more water than all other development projects in Prescott combined, while longtime residents fund twenty percent of the infrastructure making this possible without getting additional water allocation themselves.
This analysis supports productive profit from legitimate development and construction. The issue documented here is not profit itself, but extraction mechanisms that transfer publicly-created value to private interests while forcing communities to bear the costs.
Who Pays the Bills • Who Gets the Water • Community Burden • Environmental Destruction • Captured Government & Rejected Science • State-Enabled Extraction • Conclusion
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