Hot Water.

This article focuses on water rights in California. The water is almost free, since it travels mostly by gravity down from Colorado to Imperial County, California. Farmers there pay $15.50 an acre-foot, compared with as much as $431 paid by urban water agencies in southern California, where the water has to be pumped over mountains before it can fill all the hot tubs and swimming pools. Now Vivendi Environnement SA, has stepped up to the bargaining table. After years of delays hearings began this April before California's Water Resources Control Board, the bureaucracy that will approve any transfers. One big new complication is the fate of the grandly named Salton Sea, a 365-square-mile freak of nature that subsists entirely on the agricultural runoff from Imperial County.