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You really should have a chat with your county assesor. Especially if there's any recent sales of properties without meters that you can use to show the value has dropped.

Not being able to build for an unknown time does reduce the value of the land, and your assessment should reflect that. Your assessor should have information about the procedure for contesting assessments.

Edit: given that the waiting list includes projects from 2003, I have to imagine this has been an issue since at least then. There must have been some land sales since then which would help one understand the value of vacant land without water rights. If you bought after say 2013, I guess I kind of wonder why?

If there's really not enough aquifer water, it seems better to severely restrict growth in the number of fixtures than to let people build more homes that are expected to have insufficient access to water; running out of fresh water is deeply problematic.

The Santa Clara assessor takes contest filings, chuckles, and throws them away. I'd be surprised if it were different in Monterey.

That's probably the appropriate action for contest filings in Santa Clara county. Either it's a new purchase, the assessment is more or less the purchase price and someone read bad advice on the internet to always contest assessments, or the assessment has been prop 13 limited and contesting it is clearly a joke. In 2010, the Santa Clara Assessor actually lowered my assessment, which I thought was funny, but I bought in 2009, and I guess the market hadn't hit bottom quite yet. That said, if the property use is significantly impaired and the assessor wasn't aware, there's a case to be made. Although, lack of access to fresh water has been an issue in the Monterey Penisula since at least the 1970s, so I'd guess the assessor is aware, and the market should be too.

I filed a contest asking for a change of ratio between land and structure value (the assessor set it to approximately 100% land, which is comically wrong) and simply never got a response. I wasn't even trying to change the total.

If he can’t use the land he should be exempt from all taxes. Not issuing a water meter is essentially the government effectively seizing the land.

I'd love this solution.

If the government is not doing its job, taxpayers should be automatically entitled to withhold an adequate percentage of taxes, while officials in the responsible offices (up to lawmaker level) should automatically get a corresponding pay cut if enough people withhold taxes because of their office. This would introduce some incentives to actually do the job, or to push fellow officials to do their job. I feel like the incentives are skewed and that's the root cause of all these stories.

Land ownership is a matter of public record. I would start a database or spreadsheet and start looking at land ownership records, try to figure out who else is (likely to be) in the same boat and try to contact them individually.

https://california.staterecords.org/propertyrecords#:~:text=....

In other parts of the world I think people would mostly be puzzled why you haven't bribed someone already to take care of this.

If you have enough resources and time, a "takings" case like this would be an excellent case to try to get in front of our new conservative Supreme Court

Definitely. This is a de facto land seizure.

I would love to see such a case go in front of the new court. We might get lucky and overturn Euclid.

If anyone wants to use my case to sue the local (city / county) or state or federal government, they are welcome.

I see another issue worth suing the city / county of Monterey for:

- prefab housing (such as Boxabl) is banned.

Paging Peter Thiel.

In New Zealand it is not uncommon for rural or semi-rural vacation homes not to have a water supply and rely on water being trucked in and pumped into tanks.

Is that an option in your state?

What do the laws specifically say?

Does it have to be a water meter issued by them? (Can it be a new or used one you buy from wherever?) Or if it just has to be one of their meters, can you find someone who doesn't need theirs and move it?

City of Monterey:

Water Availability Status:

https://monterey.org/city_hall/community_development/plannin...

Water Meter Waiting List (there are people on there waiting since 2003 for a water meter):

https://monterey.org/Document%20Center/CommDev/Planning/Wate...

(I guess I should start by contacting everyone on the water meter waiting list...)

You didn't link to anything that prevents you from getting a meter, just an allocation. What is preventing you from getting a meter without an allocation?

Put in a request for "0.00000" if you want to go that route.

It's certainly worth trying.

Eventually.

I want to buy land in Monterey, but I am worried about running into this issue. I'd love to chat some time to see if there is anything that can be done about it. My email is virgofth at gmail. Thanks!

In general, if you won't miss the money, I'd say go ahead and buy it. Are you familiar with Nassim Taleb or Mohnish Pabrai? If you are, this is one of those low downside, high upside potential (Taleb) or Heads I win, Tails I don't lose much (Pabrai) situations.

- land in Monterey is currently cheap (because of the water meter moratorium)

- there's a mostly-complete project that will make adequate water capacity available soon [1]

- there's a not-yet-fully-approved project that will make lots more water available [2]

- a well-connected insider has told me that water will be available within the next 2.5 years

- you can extract cash up to 50% of your investment value via a HELOC

- if you do get a water meter at some point, your investment will bag 6x to 10x instantly

- it's nice for my ego to get mailers from Sotheby's International Realty asking me if I want to sell my house (they're sending these mailers to everyone, even to people such as myself who don't have an actual house on their land)

- I'm serious about engineering a class-action lawsuit against them to not only issue water meters, but to also allow prefab housing (currently banned) such as Boxabl

- lastly, just between you and me: Monterey is easily a top-5 location in the USA, if not the world. on. every. metric. there's limited land. and no more land is ever going to be produced. grab it while you still can.

[1] https://www.montereyherald.com/2021/09/23/monterey-peninsula...

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/california-coastal-commission...

So if you can't install a water meter, can you get it trucked in? Perhaps better than the alternative?

Good point: you cannot be approved for construction without a water meter.

Can you meter your own artesian water?

No more personal wells are allowed. The existing ones are grandfathered in (that beautiful invention to keep the elites of the past in power: "grandfathering").

Next you’ll tell me you can’t construct a cistern to collect rainwater either.

You basically own the land on paper for the privilege of paying taxes but the government reserves fundamental legal rights to what you can do with land you own.

Next you’ll tell me you can’t construct a cistern to collect rainwater either.

Laws against collecting rainwater are actually pretty common.

Yes, land ownership is pretty much an illusion.

Rainwater at least is falling on your property.

Unless an aquifer is entirely inside your land, it makes plenty of sense not to let you make a well.

You could technically pull water from the atmosphere, if you have enough money to burn

https://us.watergen.com/commercial/gen-m/

This is a potential long term solution to Cali's water problems.

Amazing. I guess the only thing you can do is consider holding and maintaining that land forever. Maybe one of your lineage can build a house on it one day.

Edit: oh this just came to mind. A friend of mine related to me he had similar problems building a house and hired a lawyer to essentially bribe the relevant people.

Usually the charge is for the hook-up; you bring the equipment. (It may include parts & labor for the public side.) So there's no "hack" to get construction approved if the city or county won't move forward.