Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Emergency Water Delivery Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Chairman, I don't know if it is proper to ask you a question, but is this February 2? I am reminded of the movie ``Groundhog Day.'' We continue to repeat what happened yesterday and the year before. This is a repetition of a bill that came to the floor 2 years ago. It was a bill that had a lot of different pieces to it but was very, very simple in what it accomplished, or attempted to accomplish, and that was to take water from someone--the environment, fish, and the delta, farmers, communities, Contra Costa County, the East Bay of San Francisco--and deliver it to someone else. That would be the San Luis Unit of the Central Valley Project. That was 2 years ago. It must be February 2. It must be Groundhog Day because we are doing it all over again. Whatever little whistles and bells and bows you want to put on it, this is essentially a theft of water from someone to give to somebody else. Plain and simple, that is what it is about.
In this case, the water is going to be stolen--and I use that word because that is accurate--from the delta, from the environment, San Francisco Bay, from the salmon, which is a huge industry in California, all the way up the coast to Oregon, to be given to the largest single-water district in the Nation. A district that, by its contract with the Federal Government, is specifically set to take shortages in their water when there is a drought. If this bill becomes law, that won't be the case. They will get the water and someone else won't.
Okay. We have seen this show before. We also saw before that this type of legislation, as does this bill, overturns the California constitution, pushes it out of the way, and all this is done by folks who normally call themselves State righters.
Well, this is the biggest grab of power by the Federal Government on water anywhere in the history of reclamation law dating back to 1904. Never before has the Federal Government made such an attempt to grab the water rightfully belonging to a State and saying, in this case, California, you are going to use that water as seen fit by the farm bill.
Current water law and current law and practices for a century and more have been the opposite. This doesn't solve the problem. We have got a real problem. These have been seen before and they are going to have to be seen over and over, because that was a year ago. We turn it upside right. Whatever, it is a lot of snow; right? That was a year ago, snow in the Sierras. That is this year, no snow.
And by the way, the Central Valley looks pretty much like a desert--not just the San Joaquin Valley, but the whole valley.
We have got a problem. We have a very real problem. We really need a real solution. This bill isn't a solution. This bill is a call to arms. This bill is the clarion call of yet one more battle in the great California water war, and we are all veterans of that war. My colleagues over here on the Republican aisle, my colleagues over here on the Democratic aisle, we are veterans of the water war.
Unfortunately, this bill doesn't solve the problem of California. There are solutions available. We really need to get to them. We really need to sit down and work with a bill that passed the House and the Senate and was signed by the President less than 2 weeks ago, the omnibus bill.
In that omnibus bill there is a restoration, a reauthorization of the Federal drought emergency program that has some 16, 17 different provisions that provide for specific things that we should be funding. There's no money in this bill for funding. We are going to have to fund this. This is a Westwide problem, a problem that reaches across many, many States, and it is going to take all of us working together to help each individual State, each community, and every water district deal with a very real problem. It is a battle. It is a call to arms. Get to your barricades. Pull out the old weapons. We really need a sensible solution here, and, unfortunately, this bill simply doesn't do it.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Chairman, we continually hear about the 800,000 acre-feet. Indeed, there is 800,000 acre-feet. It is not out to the ocean; It is into the delta. That water is available for a variety of purposes, including Contra Costa, the entire East Bay, and Solano County that I represent. It is there as environmental water, but it has multiple purposes, so it is not wasted water at all.
The other thing is this allocation chart that keeps coming up. That is an allocation based upon a prediction of the amount of water that rain will fall that year. It is not the actual amount of water delivered. If you take a look at the actual amount of water delivered, it is substantially greater.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, this is the final amendment to the bill, which, unfortunately, will not kill the bill or send it back to committee. If adopted, the bill will immediately proceed to final passage, as amended.
Perhaps all of you have heard that there is a drought in the West. If you haven't, I am here to tell you there is a serious drought in the West--not just California, but throughout the West.
This particular piece of legislation is said to deal with the drought. It does not. This legislation does two things that every one of us ought to be concerned about.
First of all, it is a water grab. It takes water from somebody and gives it to somebody else.
Secondly, if you are interested in states' rights, if you are interested in the power of a community to decide its own future, you had better be paying attention to this bill. This bill is very, very much about the power of a community, a power of a State to decide what it wants to do with its water.
This is an issue of profound importance to every State in the West that has a reclamation project, because this bill sets out for the very first time the Federal Government overriding State constitution, in this case the constitution of the State of California, State water law, and contracts. This is serious stuff.
If this were to somehow solve the crisis in California, you may accept it. But it does not. It does not create 1 gallon of water. It simply steals what little water there is available from some and gives it to another.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I want to be very, very clear with my colleagues. California water issues go back to the very beginning of the State, the Gold Rush, and as they have said, whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting.
Unfortunately, this bill does nothing to solve the current crisis in California. What it does, it sets in motion a series of pieces of legislation that will unravel 150 years of California water law and set in place extraordinary chaos.
It does deliver water from one area to another area, literally stealing that water and giving it to others.
It does override the California State Constitution and what we call the Public Trust Doctrine, that is, the water of California belongs to all the people of California. It is allocated by law, by precedent, and by water rights that are allocated. This overrides that.
We don't want the Federal Government to go there if you care anything about your State, about the water in your State, and about your community. We need a long-term and short-term solution.
Fortunately, in the omnibus bill, we did reinstate the Federal drought protection drought response act. We have many of the tools in place to deal with the drought today. What we don't have is money.
I would ask the majority to put up a bill that delivers the money to carry out what is already in the law, which we did just 2 weeks ago.
Unfortunately, this bill puts in place a new water war which we do not and cannot have at a time when we need to come together to solve California water problems.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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