HelenaKobrin

That is incorrect. In California people are mailed citations for exceeding allotted water usage and in some cases where religious cultists have refused to comply, water has been turned off at some people's residences. Despite the heavy rains of late we are going to have rationing again this year and fines will once again be mailed to people.
That is also wrong. All across the entire of Southern California water is retrieved from aquafers. The San Gabriel Valley has two trillion liters of water (equal to a cube of water a couple of miles on a side) ujnderground from which water is extracted and during heavy rains water is injected.

Also the underground water is retained and sold back and forth among water authority geographic and political/economic regions so that at any one time a region may be water rich or water poor, with money and water getting traded among regional authorities as economics and supplies change over time.

In the Rancho Cucamonga region, almost all of the old grape plantations and orange groves have been removed and massive increase in residential and commercial facilities have sprung up, causing unplanned draws on the aquafer retention basins underground. Rancho has been drilling injection wells and have been using fire suppression water from hydrants and injecting the water in to their newly drilled injection wells, trying to raise the water table to supply the many draw wells that are still in use in the region.

And why you think we waste water is anybody's guess but probably driven by stupidity. Potable sweet water gets wasted in the State of California no more and no less than water is wasted anywhere else. We have tremendous water runoffs from our infrastructure flood basins and flood control systems, all of which really should be retained but many billions of dollars would be needed to construct and overlay a gravity-driven system to retain all the runoff across the State.