Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from California for bringing this amendment to the floor.

The gentlewoman from Minnesota misses an important fact, and that is that the current massive water diversions have done absolutely nothing to improve salmon populations.

By taking those diversions to 40 percent unimpaired flow to the ocean, in practical terms, this means that New Melones and Don Pedro reservoirs in my district will be drained to their dead-pool levels each fall.

It would destroy what's left of agriculture in California's Central Valley, destroy the tourism these reservoirs attract in my region, and create catastrophic water shortages in one of the most water-rich regions of the Nation.

We don't build these reservoirs to dump water into the ocean. We build them to store surplus water from wet years so that we have it in dry ones.

This is insanity. It is the result of years of greens-gone-wild radicalism in California. This amendment assures that the Federal Government will not participate in such nonsense.

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