Doubt about making 20% per capita water reduction mandatory.

One big complaint about last week’s water legislation is that it is pricey; a second complaint is that the 20% water use reduction is voluntary. Those are linked. A fair bit of the $11B bond measure goes to grants to districts for conservation and infrastructure improvements. If you don’t meet the 20% by 2020 goal, [...]

It was better before.

I was all fired up to write a series of posts about this article in the Hanford Sentinel, mostly about this part:
That’s why the Kings County Water Commission spent a good chunk of a Monday night meeting talking about a Westside landowner who plans to sell 14,000 acre-feet of water a year to the Mojave [...]

Of course, that would require a functional state government.

The Pacific Institute has released another report on conserving ag water (or perhaps a final draft of the report I critiqued for ages in December) which I haven’t yet read. Some of the reported themes are maddening (furrow irrigation is not of itself inefficient, nor drip irrigation necessarily efficient; management is everything), but I can’t [...]

Long digression on the opposition to rate increases.

It is fairly common, if you follow a story for a few years to see a cycle of necessary rate increases followed by recall or ousting at the next election. Diehards get elected, swearing on their newborns that they’ll never raise rates like the last assholes. Then, the realities of the district beat them down. [...]

Why it isn’t simple to charge market rates for water. Background.

I see this stuff all the time (sometimes, I see double!): an oversimplistic assessment that raising rates for water would end shortages. I am, actually, in favor of charging by unit of water (so you pay more when you buy more, a concept so straightforward that it is embarrassing to have to say it explicitly, [...]