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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

This is an incredibly silly story. Everything about this ownership is in public records. Flannery Assoc. has been openly buying land in this are for over 5 years and have spent over a billion dollars and sued dozens of parties. Everyone knows what they are doing. They want to lease the land for energy infrastructure.

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You got to wonder if this is the PR component of a campaign to stop new energy development in the US. Another component is the political theater. Some municipalities are passing ordinances preventing Solar, for example, Eloy AZ would remove water rights to farmers who install solar on their property [1].

[1] https://www.pinalcentral.com/eloy_enterprise/commentary-tell...

Is this all part of the current "culture war" or why would you shoot yourself in the foot like this?

who is the ‘you’ in your question?

I mean jurisdictions that ban use of what could be considered "green" technology

Ah, well they do that because of dependence on or influence of some key politician or industry in my experience.

A county where all the jobs are based on Coal mining better have a pretty good and realistic plan (and good leadership) if they want to try to move away from Coal after all. And those are expensive and hard to find, even if it’s possible.

Easier to ban other options and hope it works out. Not that it usually does, but it’s the natural reaction in many cases. Denial is a natural protective response.

An almost billion dollar PR campaign?

If you stand to make several multiples of that, even over decades, it seems like a decent investment.

Seems like your comment could really benefit from some links to supporting information, since the very existence of this article is proof that not everyone knows what the company is doing.

flannery assoc is a shell company. who's providing the money for purchasing farmland at 5-10x its worth?

can you name a single officer of flannery assoc?

They will gladly name themselves when you ask them on which grounds they want to stop your heavy equipment messing around their properties. They will bring all necessary papers to you. I guess you won't leave until they'll make it absolutely clear that they have the right to demand you to leave.

Are you speaking from first-hand experience?

Doesn't it seem like a common sense? Can't government use this way to learn about the owners?

First page of google results:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/california-landowne...

“various energy and power entities had contracts or proposals to operate on Flannery-owned land”

Not knowing anything about the situation, I simply cannot imagine that the most powerful state in the world does not know (or could not find out) who is buying up gigantic swathes of land within its territory. And a separate article about a lawsuit by the company even has a quote from the company explaining the use for the land:

> In the lawsuit, Flannery said land it has acquired is used for interstate commerce. The company said various energy and power entities had contracts or proposals to operate on Flannery-owned land in the region.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/california-landowne...

"Flannery Associates LLC" is a name on a legal document. That name has zero bearing when you are looking for who actually owns and controls the land. Who are the people making decisions? Who pays them? Where is the money coming from? Is a foreign government involved?

They've apparently made many claims as to the use of the land from energy to building a city, to a deep port to farming.

Agreed. Though I think that legal entities like this need to have far far more public documentation of beneficial ownership, traceable all the way back to real people, be they US citizens or not.

This goes doubly so for any sort of land ownership. Nobody should be able to hide ownership of US land via shell games.

I'm fine with it as long as your standard also applies to family trusts. LLCs are relatively open compared to trusts. I also think people greatly overestimate the opacity of land ownership records. I just download all of the parcel maps, assessments, tax bills, and ownership data from my county assessor every year. Then people are amazed that I can answer easy question about who owns what. It seems simple to me.

Agreed on this too. A favorite hobby of mine is to look up the land ownership of people that speak at city meetings to oppose land use changes that would allow for more housing in an area.

A huge fraction of the people decrying new homes already own many parcels directly in their own name. And if the opponent is decrying "these apartments aren't affordable enough" you can be pretty sure to find a recent apartment ad renting a worse apartment at a higher price.

Which is funny, since using an LLC per parcel is probably a better strategy for the nasty landlord behavior.

why would then want to lease land for infrastructure right next to an air force base when there is lots of land further out?

Because it's windy AF and there are already large amounts of transmission lines. Look at all these windmills.

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.141376,-121.8339739,17582m/d...

Also "near Travis AFB" is being used to mean that Travis is in Solano County and most of this property is also in Solano County.

https://app.regrid.com/us/94585#b=none&o=FLANNERY+ASSOCIATES...

Wouldn't those wind turbines partially blind AFB radars?

1. No, it's not silly.

2. No, the ownership is not in public records, as this story makes clear. Who precisely is behind this seems quite vague.

3. The fact this has been "openly" (whatever that means) happening for 5 years is irrelevant.

4. No, this is begging the question. "Everyone" clearly does not know, at all, what they (who is they?) are doing.

5. What kind of energy infrastructure, precisely?

6. What's the source of your intense desire to deflect on this topic?

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