Many countries have rural water users subsidised by urban water users, because rural users need 100 times as much pipe buried and maintained per customer, but everyone pays the same rate for water.

Of course, in my country we tolerate that - it's normal for food to flow into urban areas and money to flow out, water pricing is just an obscure element of that.

In this case it seems like it's the reverse. The article claims the "bulk water" customers are responsible for 15% of the system's revenue but consume less than 1% of the water delivered.

These users were not in the piped network. They were driving to a station to collect water in tanks. If anything, that's cheaper to maintain.

Even if it's not "cheaper" it's not the utility's problem what the user's hauling equipment costs.

I’ve never seen “rural” properties on “city” water unless a pipe happened to be running down the road for an existing development anyway.

Otherwise it’s all wells, sometimes tremendously deep.

Depends on the area.

I live in iowa - nearly everyone is on rural water because wells don't produce much water. I'm on a well and I can't water my lawn - after an hour my well is empty. My well is about a meter in diameter so that should be a lot stored. it would be $20k to extend the city water pipe to my lot.

i used to live in MN, there I knew farmers on a 5cm well who had no problem watering lawns, and 50 cows from the well.

in colorado where this story is water is less available than iowa. (most farms have a year round creek that could be treated to become drinkable)

That’s one of the real solutions - we shouldn’t be using potable water for everything. Houses that are plumbed on city water should have two water sources - potable and other.

that won't help much. Water costs are mostly not in the treatment in general. pipes and pumps are the larger costs for most.

They paid for the water that the municipality could afford to sell. They didn't pay into the municipality. If the municipality doesn't have excess water, why should they be forced to sell it?

They paid the municipality for the water, but they didn't pay the municipality. Got it.

There is a very real legal and practical difference between paying for 100G of water, and paying for the right to buy 100G per week for the next N years.

Both have a price in the American west, and they did not pay the latter price.

Nobody is arguing otherwise, including the people interviewed in the article.

The claim was that these people didn't pay. That claim turns out to be incorrect.

> The claim was that these people didn't pay.

That's literally not what people were claiming. This is a lie.

If anyone actually cares about this thread, please hit "parent" a few times to see what everyone really wrote.

That's not what people are saying.

People are saying they weren't paying into the municipality. That implies people paying into the municipality are paying for more than just water. The people buying the water were just buying water.

Now, maybe that's now how you think of it, but I'm sure you can see how others see it.

Even YOU understand the difference because you had to misrepresent what people were saying.

> They paid the municipality for the water, but they didn't pay into the municipality.

That's the difference. "into" doesn't mean they are merely paying the municipality, but rather, they are paying to support the municipality.

The people buying water? They are merely buying water that's up for sale. That's it. There is no implication beyond that. Intent matters.

And it's clear that the outsiders had no intention of supporting the municipality even if you want to suggest that was the case.

I won't repeat anything I've already repeated. That seems to be a waste of time.