https://www.baycitizen.org/news/water/raise-rent-hetch-hetch...
https://www.baycitizen.org/news/water/raise-rent-hetch-hetch...
(Incidentally, in the modern era, the US Supreme Court's original jurisdiction case load is made up almost entirely of states suing one another over either water rights or boundary disputes based on rivers.)
About half of the remainder of the problem could be solved easily by ending this stupid obsession for English Country Manor lawns well outside a climate zone where they're viable, and prohibitions on all but drip irrigation for agriculture. These could be mostly accomplished without legislatorial nitpicking by simply making prices reflect scarcity, permanently. We seem to have an innate resistance, politically, to pricing water to reflect its infrastructural and depletion-replacement cost, to admitting that some mechanism needs to scale back use.
Some issues are simply not solveable, it's true - isolated water tables that have been changed by taprooted invasives are probably never going to revert to grassland, and need total cessation of irrigation activities to avoid desertification. These cases are relatively rare though.