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"Water rights were owned by the property owners having property that was adjacent to the river itself. The largest portion of those were the Granlees brothers. ... Obviously, we had to have more land and more water in order to build a viable project such as this. So we bought additional land, and we had to acquire land that was bordering the Granlees property so that we didn't cut our inventory from the Cosumnes River, so to speak. "All the land that you see here started from the Granlees ranch, and then we picked up six additional ranches, small ones, that were adjacent to each other, so that the water rights could be carried right on through.... "The Granlees property had good water rights on the Cosumnes River, being so old and ... they'd used their water rights all the time in the production of the ranch property. ... And the ranches we bought adjacent to that had no water rights on the Cosumnes River, but we were able to take our total rights and reallocate them to the eight ranches total. So we could then have enough water to develop the planned unit development." --
February 1998 interview
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