You are now in San Diego County category.

Carlsbad, home to one of the largest desalination plants in the world, will buy a bigger share of filtered seawater produced at the plant than other cities in San Diego County under an agreement approved this week.

The Carlsbad City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to sign a 30-year contract with the County Water Authority to purchase an additional 2,500 acre-feet of water annually from the $1 billion desalination plant, which was completed last year and began production in December.

Twenty-five years ago, the San Diego County Water Authority, the organization that provides water to the region’s 24 water districts, decided its water supplies had become a bit too iffy during a severe drought and set about diversifying its sources of supply.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the county water authority’s main supplier, felt dissed when its largest customer publicly questioned the reliability of its services.

According to a San Diego Union-Tribune editorial, the water authority has been persona non grata with the MWD ever since.

Let’s face it, there is an absolute limit to the amount of water that can be conserved. The continuous statistics about water conserved and the admonishments are unending.

When we follow the recommendations, the rewards are increased water rates and the loss of the gorgeous vegetation that makes California so uniquely beautiful. We, the unrepresented voters, watch helplessly as legislators ignore the obvious way to make California drought-free. They plan to construct impractical, costly miles of underground pipes that will only partially help a small part of the state.

Southern California homeowners have seen their water rates go up almost 400 percent in 10 years. Now another increase voted on by the Metropolitan Water District will raise rates on its prices for 2017 and 2018.

Jason Foster with the San Diego Water Authority says those prices will get passed on to retail water agencies in the San Diego region and then come out of the wallet of local residents and businesses. “It’s undoubtedly going to be felt by customers throughout San Diego County,” said Foster.

It’s been 25 years since the San Diego County Water Authority decided to broadly diversify its supplies. The authority’s experiences dealing with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California during a severe drought led officials to believe they urgently needed additional sources of water to avoid disaster in a future drought. This triggered a harsh response from the giant water wholesaler. Upset that its largest customer was publicly questioning MWD’s trustworthiness, MWD paid $400,000 to a public relations company for what The Los Angeles Times called a “clandestine effort to discredit San Diego County water leaders.”