Agreed, which is hardly his/her fault, but rather California/LA politics' fault.
Raise prices, or put a multi-tier pricing, or whatever; but harassment for social engineering's sake is creepy.
Raise prices, or put a multi-tier pricing, or whatever; but harassment for social engineering's sake is creepy.
On the one hand, no, being crazily abusive of the situation IS his/her fault. Legal does not imply moral or ethical, for good reasons. We legislate the minimum necessary because more restrictive legislation would harm people who have valid reasons/exceptions. Then we rely on social pressure to encourage people to not abuse that gray area.
So we have someone blatantly abusing the system.
(And while I tend to give people extreme benefit of the doubt, I have troubles believing that someone is ignorant of the drought and their relatively high water usage - if it's not the property owner, then it's someone maintaining the property that hasn't raided the issue)
I am not at all a fan of mob justice - but at the same time to ignore the role of social pressure in maintaining a balance is to invite a society I don't want to be part of: where everything not explicitly illegal is therefore endorsed.
Mob Justice can be a terrible thing: it's applied unequally, tends to ignore subtleties and justifications, and is hard to put back in to the bottle. At the same time, the law can not be the only determination of what is "right", "good", or "encouraged".
We need to find some middle ground, where society can disapprove, and the disapproval has weight but not so much weight as to strangle or suffocate someone that doesn't conform.
This individual is a jerk, no doubt, but 5 acres is small, so their overall usage compared to the total for LA county isn't very significant. LA county as a whole is abusing water.
I'd suggest a tiered pricing scheme. Current rates for water usage bellow what 99.9% of what the LA uses (to make it politically expedient), and two orders of magnitude larger otherwise.
That being said, I don't support this gentleman's water usage. But I would increase the water price high enough to hurt everyone into conservation.
[1]A city abuses water when they use water beyond the capability of it being replenished. So it's much harder to waste water in T.O. than in LA.
This is not that different from J. Edgar Hoover threatening to "out" homosexuals who didn't do his bidding in the 50s; at the time homosexuality offended the sensibilities of people in the same way that water wastage offends some today.
We might agree with the merits of limiting water use, and celebrate our advancement in the treatment of sexual minorities (I do for both), but harassment outside of the Law is abuse.