Increase the price of the higher tiers and/or rate of increase until consumption drops to level you need.
And then you don’t need to pay government employees to drive around and inspect celebrity lawns all day.
The issues cited in the article are a direct consequence of tiered rates. Districts become disinsentivised to reduce the water use for their highest using customers because thats where they make the most revenue. They need to show water use savings in gallons, but they make far more from high using customers. Its much more cost effective (gallons of water saved/reduction in revenue) for them to target users who only irrigate in the lowest use tier because thats where they receive the least revenue per unit volume water delivered.
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.
They will if the top tire price is $10000/gal. It might be politically unpalatable to push such prices, but it would surely solve the consumption problem without compromising revenue.
If there are a few people in a district of 100,000 who are using 1000x as much water as a normal household, and those people cut their usage 100%, that's still much less overall savings than convincing the remaining 99,990 people to cut their usage by 20%.
Yes, it looks bad that rich people can consume whatever they want and the masses of poor people are the ones that have to conserve, but if this is the reality of the situation then focusing on the rich seems rather petty and spiteful.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/08/24/1119112184/kim-kardashian-kev...
Someone down the street from me is not a billionaire, but the property tax savings of operating a "farm" (a vineyard) pays for a huge amount of water. And it's totally worth it for him.
There's so many perverse incentives baked into California life that it's hard to express to people outside without sounding like anything but a paranoid raving lunatic.
If water boards charged a fixed rate, and the state taxes use by tier, would that better align incentives?
Good! Now build a desalination plant and turn that into guilt-free income!
There are plenty of mega-wealthy people in California who would pay the premium to maintain their image of wealth, no matter how large. It may raise more money, but I can't imagine that it would deter consumption much, as it's already the rich using the most water.
That's not true. The main water use is agriculture, which is a pretty small portion of our GDP and would cut down usage if we raised prices.
The reason we need to properly price water isn't to increase costs for municipal use. Those rates can stay the same, or even be reduced.
The problem is that the agricultural sector is paying a fraction of the prices that municipalities pay -- or in some cases they are paying nothing at all.
Agriculture and overuse of water is a different discussion that this restrictor does not presume to address.
The article cites celebs like Kevin Hart, who has used (gasp) 150% of what LA would prefer him to use. This is simply a non-issue. It does not need to be addressed, at all.
Good. The money they're paying for water can now fund projects to get more water for everyone else (eg. desalination plants, water diversion, or buying water rights from current farmers).
However, when the resource is no longer plentiful, it is unwise to try the "let the market fix it" route (always a popular one on HN), because the resource in question can be consumed much faster than the systems you are describing can combat it (or can even be gotten off the ground.)
My previous comment mentioned acquisition methods up to and including desalination, which would make the resource virtually unlimited. If the rich want to water their huge mansion grounds and are willing to pay for a desalination plant to do it, why stop them? If they're willing to do that, and we can take a portion of that money to subsidize water supply for the poor, all the better.
https://www.advisian.com/en/global-perspectives/the-cost-of-...
tl;dr: all in cost is around $1.75/m³
This is true, but only because the amount of fines are typically identical regardless of income/wealth. Fines should be based on a percentage of income/wealth. A poor person being fined $1000 may end up homeless as a result. For a rich person, $1000 would, at most, be annoying and depending on how rich, might not be noticed even as much as that same poor person accidentally dropping a penny and being unable to retrieve it. Fine the rich person a more equivalent $100K, $1M or $100M, and their compliance level would increase dramatically.
Fixed monetary fines brings to mind this quote:
“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” — Anatole France
And there is nothing wrong with that: if you are poor and waste 10000 gal watering your lawn during draught, you should be punished because your are just as anti-social as the millionaire next door.
I'm ok with that as long as there exists a free/low cost tire that covers the basic necessities of a regular family, so that even the poor are guaranteed a certain level of service.
Yes, the rich use more water per capita, but there aren't all that many rich people compared to the rest of the population. Does the top 1% of the income distribution use more water (in total) than the bottom 99%?
As an example, LADWP charges a maximum marginal rate of 17¢/gallon. You can use as much as 650 gallons per day without hitting this rate. The basic rate is 3¢/gallon.
I believe it would have been better to have a lower base fee that does not, alone, cover fixed costs and make up the deficit by higher fees on those with high water consumption by maintaining a high per-unit water charge. The problem with this is that by not fully covering the fixed costs with the base fee, there will be seasonal variability in funding, but basic budgeting would mitigate that. And, GGP's point about such policies dishonestly being framed as, "rationing" by opponents.
And since the idiots like KK wasting all the water are multi-millionaires or billionaires, of which there are a greater conglomeration of in California then there are in the rest of the states - increasing the price of the water based on more usage won’t change a thing.
Restricting the amount of water used by individuals in general is the only way I can see this working here. But the rich always figure out a way around everything. They always do.
Same issue with the private plane bullshit going on. These people are addicted to an unsustainable lifestyle that allows them to throw money at anyone trying to put restrictions their way.
Marginal water prices mean the price for amount of water needed for a family to bathe and cook and clean costs much less than the amount of water for landscaping around an opulent home.
If people are still too poor, then giving them cash (by taking from richer people) is the solution, not pricing water so low that it gets wasted
Lack of sufficient water and excessive income/wealth gap are two separate problems with separate solutions.
Prices need to be increased (or, in some cases need to exist) for agricultural use.
I'm not totally sold on on the idea, but it is very possible to create a tiered pricing system that makes domestic water waste unsustainably expensive. The price required to deter consumption may be absurdly high, but demand elasticity will always exist at high enough prices.
First, the point was that municipal water usage wouldn’t need and change and could actually decrease in rates if agriculture and industrial paid the same market rate.
Second, if we are talking about lawn watering, that’s absolutely a middle class thing in the vast majority of California.
Buy water from their neighbours to hop on their quotas?
Tradeable quotas can be an effective way to protect a common resource.