The bills go up anyway, in order to maintain the permanently growing army of bureaucrats. The only realistic way to solve it is to bring back competition. If you have multiple competing small operators, and one of them offers better infrastructure at a reasonable extra cost, people will switch. If you let them all get merged and managed centrally, of course all you get is a carefully written apology letter blaming climate change.

I don’t think this is realistic for water. Economy of scale matters. Small-scale operators have higher costs and are more vulnerable.

At the small scale in the West, water comes from pumps that can go dry as the water table drops, or from streams that can dry up in a drought.