You are now in Media Coverage San Diego County category.

The region’s unprecedented surplus might be headed to thirsty out of state buyers. NBC 7’s Joe Little explains how that could lead to lower water bills.

President Donald Trump’s top Colorado River official visited San Diego Wednesday to say the president sees “real potential” in developing more plants that make drinking water using the ocean – right off the California coast.

That’s a problem for environmentalists, who say desalination plants are environmentally harmful, energy intensive and costly.

Even as California is offering to take less water from the drought-shrunken Colorado River, one of the state’s biggest cities that’s long been the most dependent on it curiously now has excess water to sell.

In a good year, San Diego gets barely 8 inches of rain. And not too long ago, the picturesque coastal city was staring down major water supply shortages. It’s notoriously at the end of the line of the Colorado River “straw,” a good three-hour drive from the shrinking river itself. But today, thanks in part to aggressive water recycling and urban and agricultural conservation programs and a big bet made on salt water, San Diego has a surplus and other thirsty nearby cities and states are eager to tap it.

Las Vegas has signaled interest in buying San Diego’s desalination water, the latest development in what will surely be a complex agreement permitting cities to trade water over state lines.

Last week, the board of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which provides water to the Las Vegas metropolitan area, officially signaled it wants to talk interstate water transfers by signing onto a memorandum of understanding proposed by the San Diego County Water Authority. San Diego is keen to sell off water it doesn’t need but is obligated to buy, like de-salted ocean water from a desalination plant in Carlsbad.