Fiat Water Use

Florida House and Senate leaders gave themselves big high-fives in the opening week of the 2016 legislative session after adopting a 134-page bill of water regulations and policies that give the state's water districts more central power and control over the allocation of water.

Reading through the legislation is almost akin to water torture, and the more you sink into the details, the more it appears lawmakers have adopted have conservation provisions that seem to be coming from, of all places, California.

If you paid attention at all to California's drought over the past year, predictably California lawmakers have responded to the drought with a wide range of draconian water conservation mandates and regulations and an unprecedented government commandeering of water resources and decision making. Certainly water scarcity is a concern, but there are better ways to address it than with more centralized regulation.