Authorizing Early Repayment of Construction Costs to Bureau of Reclamation

Floor Speech

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Mr. SMITH of Nebraska. I thank my colleague from Utah for yielding.

Under Federal reclamation law, irrigation districts which receive water from a Bureau of Reclamation facility typically repay their portion of the capital costs of water projects under long-term contracts.

Under its current contract and current law, Northport is exempt from annual capital repayment if this carriage fee exceeds $8,000 per year. Given that the carriage fee has greatly exceeded this amount every year since the 1950s, Northport's capital repayment debt has been stagnant at over $923,000 since 1952.

So long as the debt endures, landowners are subject to burdensome reporting requirements and acreage limitations, and no leverage is generated for the Federal Government.

I introduced this bill to provide members of the Northport Irrigation District early repayment authority under their dated reclamation contract.

Allowing producers within the Northport Irrigation District to pay off their portion of the contract means the government will receive funds otherwise uncollected, and landowners will be relieved of costly constraints which threaten family-owned operations.

For example, at a Water, Power, and Oceans Subcommittee hearing last year, one member of the Northport district testified that acreage limitations will prohibit parents who own land in the district from passing down or even selling farmland to sons and daughters who also own land in the same district.

As the chairman mentioned, similar legislation has passed under bipartisan majorities and, according to the CBO, could generate as much as $440,000 in Federal revenue.

This is a very simple bill which would make a big difference to some family farmers in western Nebraska.

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