It's a little more complicated than that...
People of all ages and backgrounds are leaving California, for a whole variety of reasons. A lot of younger folks and new families are leaving CA because they can't afford to go to school/raise a family/live in the urban areas of the state. I'm one of these people, so I know. The "mess" in California, much as I detest it, isn't my problem or my doing. We moved to CA when I was 11. I left when I was 21.
Also, what you might view as problems being exported from California are really local problems of a type (water, property rights, etc.) that were addressed (sometimes correctly, and more often, incorrectly) 10-20-30 years ago in California and are now starting to rear their heads in other places. California is the "great American experiment" and has had more than it's fair share of failures. But as history is doomed to repeat itself, many places outside of California look to big CA for the solutions, even when those solutions haven't worked out so well in CA; they get used anyways because in a lot of places, people just aren't up to the task of finding new, different solutions.
So, for instance, you've got the water problem around Spokane (BTW, I lived there for two years), which has already been explained really well. Most of the solutions proposed are similar to policies already in place in CA, which basically operates under the assumption that more-urban areas deserve more than less-urban areas because rural and less-urban areas are somehow uplifted (trickledown?) by policies that benefit more-urban areas. How's that for convoluted? Does it make any sense? Of course it doesn't. But the attitude is hey, this stuff already got tried in CA, it sort of worked, so let's try it here, maybe we'll have better luck. And anyway, nobody's proposed a better solution, and the voting rate among the locals is pathetic, so who cares. So people in Eastern Washington and rural Oregon and everywhere else get some half-ass solution shoved down their throat, that in the long run doesn't benefit ANYBODY.
This is just my view of the situation. I agree that urban areas (Seattle, Portland, the Bay Area, etc.) need to give up the deeply-ingrained attitude that rural areas "owe" them in some way, and start fending for themselves. Your city's not located over that huge aquifer? Tough. Don't steal from the towns and people that are.
On the flip side, folks in rural and semi-rural areas all across the West seem to be getting real comfortable with complaining about Californians/scientists/smelly hippies/the Gubberment/etc., and less willing to actually do anything about their lot in life, like some sort of apathetic self-defeatism.
Anyway, that's my rant...