Scientists have said that we’re in the middle of a megadrought, and the American Southwest is experiencing its driest decades in over 1,200 years. Celebrities in California are being given ineffective fines for exceeding their water allotment, while the average American in the expansive West lets their lawn wither. Now, citizens in Coalinga, California, are being told that their city’s politicians may have to buy water on the open market at prices that could bankrupt them.
The city’s only water source is an aqueduct that is managed by the federal government, and according to reports, officials think the water is going to run out before the end of this year. When that happens, according to the Washington Post, the city will have to negotiate a water market with prices up to $2,500 per acre-foot, which could cost the city millions of dollars. For context, at the end of August, California water prices hit a then-all-time-high of $1,233 an acre-foot.
Though its citizens are accustomed to water restrictions, those restrictions keep getting tighter. According to Adam Adkisson, a Coalinga city council member, the city was allotted 10,000 acre-feet of water in 2017, but that number has since gone down to 2,000 acre-feet. Residents have begun storing water in 5-gallon jugs in their homes, and the city voted nearly unanimously to stop watering lawns. In the same session, the city also posted restrictions on restaurants, disallowing them from serving water to customers unless it’s been explicitly asked for.
“It’s too much, too fast,” said Mayor Ron Ramsey, who was the only person to vote against the lawn restriction. “Go to the state capitol and they got green grass, don’t they?” he said. “They can do it, but why can’t we?”
The city mayor often races between Sacramento meetings and phone calls to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that oversees water resource management, seeking to increase their water supply, the allotment of which fell more than 1,000 acre-feet short of what Coalinga needed.
The Bureau told Coalinga that it had already exceeded its annual allotment and that if they continued to pull from the aqueduct, they’d be taking water that “belonged to someone else.” In a different statement, the Bureau said that it had been working with the city on its “unique water supply circumstances and challenges,” and gave Sean Brewer, the city’s assistant manager, lists of vendors who might sell the city the water it needed–at outrageous prices.
“It feels like we’re being singled out, small towns,” said Scott Netherton, who owns the town’s only movie theatre. “It’s like they’re trying to force them out to where you’ve got to move into the bigger cities.”
Recently, California lawmakers have sent out calls urging action on the part of the Justice Department against “drought profiteering,” or the manipulation of water prices, an act that was spurred by an investigation by federal prosecutors in April of this year that charged the former manager of a California district with stealing more than $25 million of water by diverting it from a leak in the Central Valley and then selling it.
In August, Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a 19-page plan to combat a projected 10% loss in the state’s water supply by 2040. Coalinga is projected to run out of water sometime in early December.