If you really wanna get your blood boiling read up on Sacramento as a water district... I moved to California some years ago from a water-rich area of the US after having spent some time living in a European country where water is very expensive. The state that I lived in near the Great Lakes has incredibly strict water use and pollution guidelines BECAUSE water is so integral to the social and economic well-being of that Great Lakes state. I was flabbergasted by the wastefulness of non-industry water use in California but then a few years ago I learned about Sacramento and water and was speechless:
Due to historical reasons Sacramento has absurd water use policies that have - for whatever reason - barely been changed in the past fifty years. As of 2005 only 20% of Sacramento had metered water: https://www.cityofsacramento.org/Utilities/Water/Conservatio... Yes, you read that correctly. Then, in the mid-2010s Gov. Schwarzenegger signed a bill requiring that all residential and commerical buildings in CA have water meters installed ... by 2025. Sacramento tried to 'get out ahead' of the law and install water meters which don't actual require you to pay for water used as a large portion of Sacramento is still on flat-rate water plans. The water meters simply tell you how much water you're using. The company that was doing the installation of water meters installed faulty / fraudulent meters in 90% of the 13,000 homes and business that it was contracted to install water meters at: https://sacramentocityexpress.com/2022/04/13/city-of-sacrame... A large portion of Sacramento is on flat-rate water, meaning you can use as much water as you want for ~$50 - $60 a month: https://www.cityofsacramento.org/Utilities/Water/Water-Servi... As someone who has lived in the Great Lakes region I was shocked to learn that in such an arid region of the country there's such an (absurd) thing as "flat-rate water" plans for residential and commercial buildings.
KQED did some reporting a few years ago and - unsurprisingly - in places in California where there's "flat-rate water" people use more water - A LOT MORE!- than in places where you're actually billed for your usage. Flat-rate water customers use 40% more water: https://www.kqed.org/science/15191/california-communities-th...
An upside, I guess, is that I was looking at a habitability map produced by the (US) public television station(s) and within 20-30 years the Central Valley will be so hot for most of the year as to render it uninhabitable. I guess the 'plan' of Sacramento - the state government, I mean - is to stick their heads in the sand for another few decades until there's a massive population exodus from Central Valley. Houses on the coast are so expensive, yes, because people want to live there now, but are also taking into account that most of the interior of the state will not be liveable in a few short decades. (Heres's the link to the analysis that was shown on my local public TV station: https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/ Note how the middle of California becomes too hot to sustain life within a few decades. I'm personally of the belief that this will happen sooner due to depleted aquifers and general mismanagement of the water table. Water evaporation 'behaves strangely' when you've already screwed up the porous groundwater-holding rock that is underneath the surface water - lakes, rivers, wetlands, etc.)