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The $100 Million Position
Who Water Asset Management Is — and What Emporia III LLC Tells You
Water Asset Management was founded in 2005 by Matthew Diserio and Disque Deane Jr. It describes its mission as "investing exclusively in water quality and availability for communities, agriculture, and the environment." Its headquarters: Madison Avenue, New York City. Its investment strategies span public water utility equities, long/short hedge fund positions, and private real asset acquisitions — principally farmland with attached water rights in water-stressed regions of the American West.
The McMullen Valley purchase was made through Emporia III LLC — a Delaware limited liability company. Delaware requires no public disclosure of LLC ownership. No names. No addresses. No beneficial owners on the public record. A Delaware LLC can hold $100 million in Arizona farmland and water rights, and the public record shows: a Delaware LLC. That is it.
Emporia III is the third in a named series — suggesting Emporia I and Emporia II preceded it, presumably holding other acquisitions in WAM's private portfolio. The naming convention is itself informative: this is not a one-off purchase. It is a fund structure, systematically acquiring positions, numbered sequentially.
The Playbook — Documented Across Multiple Acquisitions
Water Asset Management is not secretive about its investment thesis. Its public materials describe a strategy of acquiring water-related assets in water-stressed regions, implementing efficiency improvements, and generating returns through the increasing value of water in a scarcity environment. What its public materials do not specify — because they don't have to — is the exit mechanism: who buys the water when WAM is ready to sell the position.
The Greenstone deal established the exit mechanism clearly. A private entity acquires agricultural land with attached water rights at agricultural value. It holds the position while scarcity increases the water's value. It sells the rights to a municipal buyer — a suburb, a city, a water district — at scarcity premium. It exits with the profit. The rural community that provided the water absorbs the agricultural contraction.
The McMullen Valley purchase was recorded in La Paz County public records under Emporia III LLC — a Delaware limited liability company. This is not an accident of corporate structure. It is the deliberate use of a legal jurisdiction specifically chosen for its disclosure minimalism.
Delaware requires no public disclosure of LLC ownership. No names of members or managers. No addresses. No beneficial owners. A $100 million purchase of Arizona farmland and water rights can be made by a Delaware LLC, and the public record available to La Paz County residents — whose aquifer is being positioned for potential transfer — contains: the LLC name, the purchase price, and the acreage. That is all.
Who owns Emporia III LLC? Water Asset Management, as the fund manager. Who are the LPs — the institutional investors whose capital funded the $100 million purchase? Not publicly disclosed. The same opacity that Series 3 documented in university endowment PE investments — Harvard's Brazilian farmland through seven-layer shell structures starting with a Delaware LLC — operates identically here. The Series 6 investigation we have planned — The Plumbing — documents Delaware LLC anonymity as one of six legal mechanisms that run every machine in this investigation. McMullen Valley is the mechanism operating in real time, on a water-stressed aquifer, in a county of 17,000 people who cannot find out who owns the entity that just bought 20 square miles of their groundwater.
The Scale Comparison That Closes the Argument
The gap between what Greenstone did and what WAM is positioned to do is not just scale. It is the difference between a completed transaction and an anticipated one — between a precedent that has been set and a machine that has learned from it.
Greenstone's deal established: the regulatory pathway exists. ADWR can approve agricultural-to-urban transfers. The Bureau of Reclamation's NEPA process, though found legally deficient, did not prevent delivery. The rural county's lawsuit won on procedure but not on substance — the water flows. The precedent is documented, litigated, and confirmed.
WAM's $100 million position in McMullen Valley is being built in the knowledge of that precedent. The same county. The same legal framework. Arizona legislation being drafted to facilitate exactly this kind of transfer. The machine is not guessing. It is following the map that Greenstone drew.
As of early 2026, Arizona legislators are actively drafting bills that would facilitate water transfers from rural basins — including the McMullen Valley — to Phoenix-area municipalities. This is not a hypothetical risk that La Paz County residents are projecting. It is active legislative activity that water policy analysts and local officials have confirmed is underway.
The sequence matters: WAM purchases 12,793 acres in McMullen Valley in July 2024. Greenstone's deal — in the same county — has already demonstrated that the regulatory pathway works even when a federal judge finds it legally deficient. Arizona legislators begin drafting transfer-enabling legislation for McMullen Valley. The legislation would make future transfers easier — potentially removing or streamlining the NEPA review process that created legal vulnerability for Greenstone.
What this means in practice: The legislative infrastructure to facilitate the transfer is being built while the position is being held. By the time WAM is ready to sell — whenever the fund's investment horizon requires an exit — the legal pathway may be significantly smoother than it was for Greenstone. The lesson Greenstone's lawsuit taught: the NEPA review process creates legal vulnerability. The response: legislation to reduce that vulnerability before the next deal is attempted.
La Paz County Supervisor Holly Irwin — who called the Greenstone deal "a despicable water grab" — has raised similar concerns about the WAM acquisition. The county of 17,000 people has limited leverage against a New York hedge fund with $100 million in cash, a Delaware LLC structure that shields its beneficial owners, and state legislators drafting bills to facilitate the transfer its business model requires.
WAM's stated mission is water sustainability, not extraction. Its public materials describe investment in water quality and availability. It frames its farmland acquisitions as conservation-oriented — implementing efficiency measures that reduce water use, extending aquifer life, and creating flexible supply for water-stressed regions.
The efficiency argument has merit. Agricultural irrigation in the American West is notoriously inefficient. Flood irrigation — still common — can lose 30–50% of applied water to evaporation and runoff. An entity that buys agricultural land, implements drip irrigation and precision agriculture, and reduces water consumption by 30% has genuinely extended the aquifer's life. Whether that extended life belongs to the rural community or to the fund's LPs is the question.
WAM in a statement (2024) said it supports "production agriculture, voluntary conservation, and collaborative solutions." It said the McMullen Valley acquisition was made with the intent to continue farming and implement water efficiency improvements. No transfer has been announced. It is possible — though not consistent with its documented track record in other acquisitions — that WAM holds the position indefinitely as a farming operation.
The honest tension: A fund that raises capital from institutional investors on the promise of returns must eventually generate those returns. The returns available from farming 12,793 acres in an Arizona desert basin are not proportional to a $100 million investment. The returns proportional to $100 million require a water rights transfer at scarcity premium. The fund's structure requires the exit that its stated mission does not acknowledge. Both things are true of the same entity simultaneously.
What Posts 6 and 7 Together Establish — and What Post 8 Will Map
Posts 6 and 7 document the private extraction end of the water machine: not government failure, not corporate permit abuse, not treaty exclusion — but private capital systematically acquiring positions in a scarce public resource, building the legal and legislative infrastructure to monetize those positions, and structuring the ownership through Delaware LLCs that shield the beneficial owners from the public record.
The communities at the receiving end of this extraction are not abstractions. La Paz County is 17,000 people. It was 20,000 people in 2010. It is losing population as agricultural activity declines — partly because the water that sustained that agriculture is being repositioned for transfer to suburban Phoenix. The county supervisor calls it a despicable water grab. The fund calls it sustainable investment. The aquifer does not adjudicate between the characterizations. It simply has less water in it when the transfer is complete.
Post 8 maps the complete architecture of everything this series has documented: the 1922 Compact that over-allocated a river, the permit system that charges under $1,000 for 210 million gallons, the treaty rights that have been waiting since 1868, the regulatory failures that produced Flint and Jackson, and the private extraction machine that Greenstone proved and WAM is scaling. Eight posts. Eight mechanisms. One water system. One finding about who gets protected — and who supplies the resource that protects everyone else.
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