Water Crises

Floor Speech

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Mr. COSTA. Mr. Speaker, I would like to once again rise to address the water crises that are facing not just California, but our Nation and throughout the world.

Today, global communities and business organizations have joined together, and the White House is holding a water summit to raise awareness of the 650 million people around the world who don't have access to safe drinking water, urging leaders to focus on ways in which we can increase access to safe, sanitary water. This is appropriate, but it is long overdue.

On the Web site, waterday.us, it states: ``Water stress is the impact a lack of water has on a particular sector or population. Water stress affects nutrition, public health, environmental services, housing and urban growth, and national security.''

And national security is directly related to our ability to grow food to ensure that American consumers are independent and have sufficient nutrition for their daily consumption.

Water, therefore, is a resource issue of the future not only for our Nation, but throughout the world. These impacts of not having a reliable and safe water supply are all too familiar for those of us who live in the San Joaquin Valley in California and my colleagues who represent that area.

So while I believe it is fitting and appropriate that we recognize that there is a nationwide and worldwide issue regarding our water resources and how we manage them--with the planet having 7 billion people last year and by the middle of this century another 2 billion, or 9 billion people--we need to look at both short-term and long-term comprehensive solutions to our water needs not just throughout the world, but here in the United States, specifically, in California.

So I find it extremely disappointing that California's San Joaquin Valley is not at the forefront of this discussion after 4 years of devastating drought.

While I empathize with those in Flint, Michigan, and other areas of the country, like those of us in the San Joaquin Valley, we have been facing water shortages for 4 years; it is getting much worse; and there is less national attention being focused on our plight.

In the valley, instead of lead poisoning due to the failure of all levels of government, as we have seen in Flint, Michigan, we are dealing with waters that have high nitrate levels in drinking water. In addition to that, in many places, we don't have access to water at all.

The solutions are clear. We need to increase Federal funding for infrastructure to build resiliency during drought periods and reduce the impacts of water quality using all the water tools in our water toolbox.

We need to increase coordination between local, State, and Federal agencies to reduce the impacts of communities impaired by water quality or a lack of access to water.

Finally, we need to increase our focus on ensuring that regulations, where they are in place, achieve their intended purpose while minimizing negative impacts that they have with contradictory results.

For instance, due to the decisions made by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Bureau of Reclamation is required to operate pumps in California's water system under what I believe are scientifically flawed provisions, biological opinions, which have lost, as a result, hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water.

This year, if the Federal agencies had operated within the flexibility provided even in those flawed biological opinions, San Joaquin Valley communities could have been provided an additional 2- to 300,000 acre-feet of additional water. In addition to that, that would have benefited over 400,000 households.

As a result of the drought and the inability to capture water that is flowing in the system, over 600,000 acres of prime productive agricultural land have gone unplanted, and we have seen families impacted. Families that literally do not have access to water have had to bottle in water.

There is a very certain human toll--the impact--that is taking place to provide highly uncertain benefits for species. This is unacceptable, it is avoidable, and it is immoral.

I urge the Federal agencies to take action to do experimental increases in pumping with increased detection and monitoring so we can find out if, in fact, delta smelt and salmon traveling through the delta are even being harmed by the exact pumping levels under discussion.

So while I appreciate the comprehensive plan the administration is trying to implement to solve our Nation's water crisis, we need short- term solutions now so that farmers, farm workers, and farming communities in the San Joaquin Valley do not go without a water supply under the Federal project for a third year in a row.

Additionally, we must do everything possible to get Federal legislation passed and signed into law that would not only deal with our short-term needs, but to deal with our long-term needs as well. We passed the House bill last year.

We need to get Senator Feinstein's bill passed so we can go to conference because, if the Federal agencies don't act--and they have not been doing the job that I would like to see them do--then Congress must act.

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