I didn’t find anything on Snopes about it, but it does sound pretty damned out there to me.
If you lived here and saw some of the crap they’ve tried to pull with the water in the past you wouldn’t think it was out there at all. Things like taxes imposed by the square foot for parking lots due to rainwater impediment. There’s a group pushing legislation to impose meters on private wells. A few years back I caught a guy measuring how far my well was from the lake.