California continues to suffer through its third summer of drought, but the state’s water market runs free鈥攁nd people are for the stuff. To put it in textbook-visualization terms, the price has climbed as high as $2,200 for an amount of water that would cover a football field in a foot-deep layer.
Anyone with water to spare is taking advantage of that. That mostly includes water districts and farmers, who are making millions of dollars from private water sales, predominantly to other farms. As California cities or pay them for planting drought-resistant vegetation, the state has allowed the market to set the price for water.
Hence the four-digit price tag. According to the Associated Press, economists are saying that “.” In fact, at a California Environmental Protection Agency meeting on Tuesday, staff members projected that this month’s water demand in Sacramento and the San Joaquin River watershed would be . In some rural areas, the AP says, water auctions have become a spectacle; one water district got about 50 bids for extra water.
As other drought-prone states like Texas and Colorado follow suit, some water economists say they would like to see more regulations on these sales. The state maintains that buyers and sellers are capable of negotiating amongst themselves. “Now everyone’s mad at me, saying I increased the price of water,” Maurice Etchechury, manager of the Buena Vista Water Storage District, said at his district’s publicly broadcast water auction in February. “I didn’t do it, the weather did it.”