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California Emergency Drought Relief Act of 2014

Floor Speech

Date: Dec. 8, 2014
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: National Security Environment

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, California's regulatory drought was
causing enormous economic damage and human hardship long before the
historic natural drought that has now stricken the State. And through
all of those years, the House has passed legislation repeatedly to
address it.

Finally, after years of inaction, the Senate produced a modest
measure to provide very limited flexibility for water managers to deal
with it. This bill largely reflects those provisions. It is a
temporary, stopgap measure that suspends no environmental laws and no
regulations. It simply tasks Federal water managers to conserve our
water for beneficial human use to the maximum extent possible once all
State and Federal environmental and water rights laws have been
fulfilled. Let me repeat: the bill explicitly requires all
environmental laws and regulations to be adhered to. All the House
added to the Senate bill are provisions to strengthen water rights for
areas of origin by adding Federal protection over these rights.

During the worst drought in California's history, we continue to
release billions of gallons of water from our dams just to adjust river
temperatures for the fish. Sadly, this bill doesn't even affect this
wasteful practice. But during the next year and a half, it does give
limited flexibility to water managers within these laws. That is
important because we are getting some rainfall this season, and once
all of the environmental laws have been fulfilled, we desperately need
to store what surplus remains for what could be another very dry year.

To take that surplus above and beyond what is needed to meet all of
our environmental mandates and dump it into the Pacific Ocean, as my
colleagues on the left suggest we should do, is nothing short of
lunacy. The fact that this very modest bill has evoked such apoplexy
from the left is a measure of just how extreme and out of touch they
have become. I wish this bill did much more, but it is a start.

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