Water Authorities are basically licenses to steal... not a one of them I have ever seen in operation has not been anything but cronism and legalized theft.
This is just an extreme case of business as usual.
I dunno. I have private water now, but town I used to live in had a three person water board, with rotating chairman. None of them did it as a full time job, I'm not sure it even paid and water was almost free. They rented space on the storage towers to cell phone companies and that just about paid for all our water. And the town had difficulties with aquifer contamination by W.R. Grace and insane state regulations. One of the guys on the water board lived on our cul-de-sac and he was absolutely a straight shooter.