Is it? One might assume on fce value and with a bit of charity that's the point. But districts are in a contradictory position. They are being mandated by state of California to reduce water usage. If they did so by mandating caps, this could work. However, their revenues would drop linearly with use in a flat rate scenario. If, rather, a district goes without caps and uses a tiered price structure, they can up the price enough on the bottom teir that the 'commoners' do cut back on water usage enough to meet their goals. However, there is a subset of users for whom price of water is not an issue. They want a putting green or driving range in the back yard. They want to feel like they are in Kauai or Maui when they sit in their backyard garden in Malibu. They already spend hundreds of thousands building a water slide in their back yard, what's a couple grand a month for the kids to enjoy it? You might think of these as extreme examples, but I've seen each of these. These people
do not care about the price of water.
With tiered based rates a district can maintain revenues and can make overall reductions. These rate increases happen at the bottom tier to create reductions in use and at the highest teirs to maintain revenues.
The result is that all of the lower and middle income regions stop watering completely, and the wealthy just ignore any water use limitations. Some of these water users use 10-1000x as much water as a typical SFR, 5000 SQ foot lot.