[nothercastle]

There is almost always enough water to water your lawn but you would have to cut off industrial water waste/use and cities won’t do that. So you can’t water your lawn but Coca-Cola down the block wastes thousands of cubic feet a day without a care

[tharkun__]

There's no Coca-Cola down the block from here (nor a Nestle bottling plant ;)). Nor any high water usage industries (no real "industries" at all actually). We're one of a few towns in the area with municipal wells tapping an aquifer.

The next big city does not take water from an aquifer at all but from a river. One that's also currently lower on water than usual, which is not great because upstream cities put their sewage in there and that city does the same "downstream" (which will add to the problem cities even further downstream are going to have that also use the river water).

[baggy_trough]

Inefficiencies like this are due to not charging a proper market price for water.

[nothercastle]

Yeah that’s true though it can get problematic when you charge market rate and price people out. Say like when a data center moves to town and messes up electricity prices for everyone