This morning I listened to a pitch for purchasing a book on gardening - basically it describes how to container garden a 4 X 4 foot plot. The book is targeted to the same folks who spent over $100 on non-hybrid seeds that they heard advertised on the Glenn Beck show. For example, the book covers how to hide your plot from the government since in the future growing your own food will be illegal.
One of the examples given of the ongoing government over-reach was the claim that it is illegal to collect your own rainwater in Colorado. The narrator said that you could be arrested and taken to jail for collecting your own rain water from your own property.
It isn’t a joke. Colorado has lots of water related laws that sound strange in wetter parts of the country. Some limited rainwater collection is allowed for people that have private wells and also meet other criteria but other people can go to jail (at least in theory) for collecting or diverting rainwater that falls on their property. This isn’t a new thing (in fact, the well exemption is a rather recent relaxation of the older laws). Water rights has been the subject of strict laws since Colorado was a territory.
Water law is very, very complicated (at least to me) but what you are talking about concerns the concept of downstream rights. In water law, downstream rights are protected, so anyone upstream–which would be anyone in the Colorado mountains, and most people in the state–who collect rain water are essentially hoarding it, thus keeping it from downstream uses. Unless they have senior water rights. (As I said, it’s complicated.) Fines are more likely than jail time, but I guess jail is a possibility for repeat offenders.
So if you live in the mountains you can’t water your container garden with saved rainwater because you will be depriving a golf course in Arizona.