#privitization

In recent years its pretty common knowledge that wealthy expats (90% being Americans) have been buying the properties lining the Coast of Puerto Rico. In addition to gentrification and displacement of local and native Puertorricans- they're lobbying to repeal a long standing law protecting our beachs.

Since Spanish rule, there's been a designated Zona Marítimo-Terrestre, which means The Maritime-Terrestrial Zone. This designated that the public owns everything up to the mean high-tide line, as well as the area inland reached by high-danger waves. In general terms, the beaches are public.

IN 2024 there has abeen some adoptation to better care and conserve the beach with Title 12 - Conservation (§§ 1-16 — 8162), Subtitle 3 - Water Protection (§§ 231 — 417), Chapter 24C - Promotion, Protection and Conservation of the Beaches Aspiring to the Blue Flag (§§ 258 — 258e), and § 258d - Parameters (link here for Justia in depth review of these laws).

As of 2025, suddenly there's been a push to revoke these laws and privatize the beaches.

Puerto Rico House Bill 25 (P.C. 25), authored by House Speaker Carlos “Johnny” Mendez, proposes to change the definition of the ZMT.

Governor Jenniffer González Colón has been pushing a “Special Tourism Planning Zone of the Houses and Docks on the water and public domain lands of La Parguera”- and signing executive orders to further privatization that serves no one BUT tax avoiding foreigners. This woman has even taken away protections for our sacred Rainforest, El Yunque (which is also the first and only national rainforest registered by the US parks department).

At this point I am annoyed anyone would elect someone Ricardo Rosselló personally supports (the Governor who's chat leaks included contemplating weather he should have certain people assasinated in PR), but I am also just upset that mediocre US leaning candidates keep getting the opportunity to further damage Puerto Rico. PR isn't going to get the care it needs when so much of the voters and politicians are only caring for the US and politicians that have no affect on PR.

For a rich and fairly stable country, we are staggeringly ill-prepared for climate shocks. We respond to predictable crises as if we had had no warning. Lessons from previous disasters go unlearned, mistakes are recycled, failures lodged so deeply that they come to define the system.

Nothing undermines climate resilience in this country as much as the private ownership of our water system, and nothing reveals the drought of political ambition like the refusal to renationalise it. Once again we find ourselves confronting simultaneously both the climate crisis and the political crisis.

As successive governments have stood and watched, we have been comprehensively rinsed by the water companies. The current administration seems prepared to go to any lengths not to break this pattern.

For 36 years, these companies have acted as dispensers of free money to their owners, most of which are foreign, some of which are foreign states. In fact, the only government not permitted to own England’s water supply is the UK’s. They must see us as total suckers, giving away our national infrastructure, land and assets … for less than nothing.

Any investments have been funded not by shareholders but by their customers, through our water bills. These rose in the same period by 360%, more than twice the general rate of inflation. The rise has since accelerated. Every year, we pay £2.3bn more for our water and sewerage bills than we would if the suppliers were publicly owned, according to research by the University of Greenwich. High bills, impossible debts, filthy rivers, minimal investment and no resilience: that is the gift of privatisation.

Demand management has been [...] hopeless, with the result that, without further action, water demand will exceed supply by 2034. Given that their profits from metered customers depend on the amount we use, the water companies have a powerful incentive not to address the problem. Instead, as supplies become critically low, they insist that they must be allowed to extract even more from our rivers and aquifers, with dire impacts on wildlife and water quality.

For similar reasons, they resist imposing hosepipe bans until the last possible moment. It seems crazy that this decision should be left to the water companies, with their perverse incentives and conflicts of interest, rather than being taken by public bodies; but this is yet another outcome of the public-bad, private-good elite ideology. Even senior Tory MPs expressed frustration that government could not simply decide what needed to be done; but that’s the system they built, working as designed.

As for the regulators, they too are useless by design. Ofwat, which is meant to protect the public interest, has succumbed to full-scale regulatory capture, as senior staff circulate between the water companies and the agency supposed to hold them to account. The Environment Agency, chronically underfunded and demotivated, almost halved its water use inspections in the five years to 2023: a classic example of deregulation by stealth. The rules might remain on the statute book, but without monitoring and enforcement they might as well have been deleted.