Weird news: Possible to be convicted for storing rain water

It sounds so weird, but must be normal for those who live in the region. Places that have a lot of water scarcity can have extensive legal arrangements for accounting for every drop of water; but, but, water that falls from the sky is also accounted for ? You live in a place, have a yard, but if you were to store the water falling from the sky in a water barrel for watering the garden, you have committed a crime ? That sounds so weird ? If having a water barrel is illegal and could lead to you being charged, building a water harvesting and recharge system would lead to long prison sentences ?
However, this legal arrangement is something that has been arranged by the law-makers of the state, and a process to try and change this to allow home-owners to save rain-water was defeated. (link to article):

Water is precious in the arid West, now more than ever as the worst drought in decades bakes fields in California and depletes reservoirs across the region. To encourage conservation, cities and water agencies in California and other states have begun nudging homeowners to use captured rain for their gardens, rather than water from the backyard faucet. But Colorado is one of the last places in the country where rainwater barrels are still largely illegal because of a complex system of water rights in which nearly every drop is spoken for. And when legislators here tried to enact a law this spring to allow homeowners to harvest the rain, conservationists got a lesson in the power of the entrenched rules that allocate Western water to those who have first claim to it. Even if it is the rain running down someone's roof.