> The Palo Verde Irrigation District is not allowed to sell the water – not to the company Calistoga, say, for bottled water, but not to their farmers, either.

> The Palo Verde Irrigation District is not allowed to sell the water – not to the company Calistoga, say, for bottled water, but not to their farmers, either. Blythe farmers are thus only charged to cover the water district’s overhead – $77 an acre a year, an astonishingly low rate. > In other places, people are charged according to how much water they use and are thus incentivized to use less. In Blythe, no matter how much he uses, a farmer gets his water for a cheap, flat rate. So the farmers are incentivized to use as much water as they can. It should not be surprising, therefore, that they do so. (I gather it's a use-it-or-lose-it setup, and I'm also guessing that the farmers aren't allowed to take the water and resell it elsewhere; subjecting it to market prices would at least push the water towards more efficient users.) Perverse incentives lead to perverse results.