To boil down your excellent remarks and my lesser ones re the drought Nazis.
Our California cities and counties mini czars are so broke paying themselves, the unions, their illegals and other tax suckers, they seize any opportunity to increase taxes er fees.
Since we need water to survive, they create pumping fees and levels of use fees with higher prices on each level.
AND: they send celebritards out telling us to use low pressure toilets and to only use one square of toilet paper.
Yeah, they find any excuse to tax and play the class or race card to extract more from some than others.