That's a mantra of idiots. Building stuff won't make it rain. It will just cost us lots of money to have more empty reservoirs. We'll need the money for natural gas-fired electric power plants to replace the hydro-electric power that will stop when existing reservoirs empty.
The real problem is that the 20th Century was the wettest hundred-year period in the Southwest since 1000 A.D. Just a return to normal rainfall and snow out here means a 1/3 drop in what we've been used to. A real drought will drop our water by 2/3. Long droughts in the Southwest last a century or two.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/02/drying-west/kunzig-text
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00D4EWHPU/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o02_?ie=UTF8&psc=1
That's not a quote from the article nor is it from a Freeper.
Why are you putting it forward as a quote?
Outside of your strawman: investment in water infrastructure is vital for populations in arid climates or in places with heavy runoff.
For instance: the Israelis get something like 40% of their domestic water from Desalination plants.
They don't get a lot of rain, so they do something about it.
California (OTOH) erects insuperable barriers to desalination licenses as well as other water infrastructure. I seem to remember that Poseidon just got a desalination license after jumping through multiple environmentalist hoops at huge expense.
Having studied some of the dendrochronology upon which that claim is based, I can say with some confidence that they really don't know what those rainfall years really were, particularly because of the Little Ice Age.