I had not heard of cities buying up water rights.
That is not done around here, but if someone has done something horrible, it is almost certain the lefties will bring in down on everyone eventually.
Water in the west has always been a hot-button issue. In fact Mark Twain once said that whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting. Since water rights are kind of like mining law, using the doctrine of first appropriation, whoever put the water to beneficial use first gets to claim first priority. So if an old timer dug ditches and diverted most of a stream to water his fields back in 1869, he owns the right to that amount of water. If someone did the same thing a hundred miles downstream but did it a year before this guy in 1868, then the 1869 farmer has to let enough water pass to supply the senior user’s traditional right. If it’s a dry year and there is not enough water for both, the 1869 farmer has to just watch the water flow by while his crops wither away. Fast forward to a hundred years later, a city buys the senior 1868 water right, and takes that same amount of water out of the creek upstream of both farmers, the city can suck out all the water, up to the amount that the 1868 right and even if they dry up the creek completely they can legally do so. The 1869 farmer just has to hope that there is more water in the creek. Cities like Denver even build pipelines, hundreds of miles long that can carry water from a river that used to flow to the Pacific Ocean and divert it to the other side of the Continental Divide. The same sort of thing applies to ground water that is pumped from wells. The end result is that many wells have meters on them. In the West, you can’t even claim the water that is on your own ground. It can be quite frustrating.