“As a future retiree, I have other priorities: low property taxes, good access to country/forest jogging trails, low crime, the aforementioned high-speed Internet service, etc.”
Then I fail to see why you inquired about our water situation unless your goal was to be argumentative. You aren’t going to find low taxes in this state and crime has been one of our growth industries.
Not being argumentative - am truly sorry if you perceived it as such. Rather, I was sincerely puzzled by all the concern about water. This issue might be self-evident for most other FReepers, but it wasn't (isn't) for me. For me, paying, say, 1¢ per cubic meter for one's household water rather than, say, 0.1¢ per cubic meter is a mere blip on the radar screen. Unless things are so bad that people are being forced by circumstances to carry around their daily ration of H2O in hip-flasks, this issue might be around #87 on my list of important criteria.
I do agree that local ordinances prohibiting watering one's lawn or filling one's own backyard swimming pool could be quite irksome - but I suspect that, in such localities, if it wasn't water scarcity, the local liberals would not rest until they found some other "important issues" requiring intrusive Nanny State regulations.
And I do agree that there are probably a LOT of other issues (criminality - home-grown and "imported" - air quality, the density of health-care providers, hurricanes, earthquakes, property taxes, etc.) that would figure much more prominently on my list. (I don't live in California, so I would tend to tread cautiously in criticizing such factors.)
Regards,