-9999
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Madam President, I rise to speak in support of the Restore Aging Infrastructure Now RAIN Act, which I introduced today. Senator Alex Padilla is cosponsoring the legislation.
This bill has three purposes: No. 1, upgrade aging canals and other facilities owned by the Bureau of Reclamation to provide environmental and other benefits; No. 2, for the first time provide grant funding rather than loans for Reclamation facility upgrades that provide drinking water for disadvantaged communities; and No. 3, incentivize agricultural and municipal irrigation districts to participate in these projects by giving them a 15 percent discount on what they owe for repairing the aging facilities that serve them.
Let me explain these three bill purposes in more detail. First, Congress has appropriated $3.2 billion for the Bureau of Reclamation to repair its aging canals, dams and other facilities. If the Federal taxpayers are spending this much money to retool Reclamation infrastructure for the needs of the 21st century, the Department of the Interior should have the authority to modify the Reclamation facilities to achieve increased environmental benefits, drinking water for disadvantaged communities, and other project benefits.
This bill applies to Reclamation ``transferred works'' facilities, which are operated and maintained by agricultural or municipal water districts. The bill authorizes Reclamation to modify these transferred works facilities when the Agency is repairing them, as long as the modifications add no more than 25 percent of the cost of the repair projects, or $25 million for repair projects costing less than $100 million.
In California, this could be particularly helpful for projects to restore major Central Valley Project canals that have lost up to 60 percent of their conveyance capacity due to subsidence. These projects are important to allow farmers to capture runoff from our increasingly concentrated winter storms and move the water to overdrafted areas where it is needed to recharge the local aquifers.
As I mentioned, the bill applies to those Reclamation facilities known as ``transferred works,'' which are operated and maintained by agricultural or irrigation water districts. In order to modify these projects when they are being repaired, the Secretary must obtain the consent of the transferred works operating entity and any individual water district that would receive less water under the modified project.
Many Bureau of Reclamation facilities were built for the sole purpose of assisting agricultural water supply. This irrigation focus is critically important in the arid West. However, as climate change stretches western water supplies, Reclamation facilities will need to serve multiple purposes as efficiently as possible.
There are many rural communities in the areas served by Reclamation facilities that have dwindling water supplies. In California, many of these communities are home to migrant farmworkers who plant and harvest the crops that Reclamation water deliveries support.
All too often, these communities' water supplies have become unreliable as groundwater tables drop, or drought reduces surface water supplies for lengthy periods. Many of these communities lack the ratepayer base and income levels to provide clean drinking water to meet their residents' basic daily needs.
In order to meet this challenge, the bill authorizes Reclamation to offer grants rather than loans when it modifies existing Reclamation facilities to provide drinking water for disadvantaged communities. Eligible communities are defined using existing precedent that their median family income must not exceed 80 percent of the statewide median family income.
In California, this could be particular helpful for the major canal repair projects which are restoring the original capacity of the Friant-Kern Canal, the California Aqueduct, and the Delta-Mendota Canal, all of which have been damaged by subsidence. Under the bill, Reclamation can now modify these upgraded canals to provide turnouts to recharge the aquifers of disadvantaged communities along the canals.
As a result, when we have wet years like this past winter, Reclamation could send some of the flood flows to help these communities boost their local water supplies.
These project modifications can be an efficient way to assist these disadvantaged communities; the canals already exist, works crews will already be mobilized to repair them, and in many cases, the canals run very near the communities that would benefit.
To make the bill work, agricultural and municipal water districts must participate in these modifications to Reclamation facility repair projects.
In many cases, the water providers will face disincentives to participate in these projects. Some providers may see their benefits reduced. All providers will have to accept significant delay in obtaining the benefits of the restoration of these projects. It will take significant time to modify the projects in a manner that the providers can accept and then to conduct environmental compliance on the proposed modification. The providers will also have to accept modified project operations that give increased priority to public benefits.
To offset these disincentives for water providers to participate in modifications to projects which increase just public benefits, the bill reduces the amount the providers have to pay for the underlying repair projects by 15 percent. The result is that each project beneficiary will pay 85 percent of the costs for the modified project that the beneficiary would otherwise have been allocated.
This provision sets up a financial incentive for water providers to support modified projects that solely increase environmental and other public benefits without increasing water diversions or other water supply benefits. Without this financial incentive, water providers might be expected to frequently oppose such modification of the projects that they rely on for water deliveries. In the case of canal restoration projects, the agricultural water districts will receive less water than they would have under the original canals at full capacity if an increased amount of the water is diverted for dedicated to disadvantaged communities or wildlife refuges. The financial incentive is important in this context to avoid generating agricultural water district opposition to project modifications to benefit disadvantaged communities and wildlife refuges.
This approach is consistent with Reclamation programs like the Title XVI and large-scale water recycling programs. These programs provide 25 percent Federal grant funding for projects that increase municipal water supplies, even where the benefiting communities are not disadvantaged. These grants are justified because the recycled water programs provide both water supply and broader public benefits by reducing pressure to divert water from often overallocated streams and rivers. With this bill, too, the modified projects merit some Federal grant funding because they provide a range of public benefits beyond just regular water supply, including potentially environmental benefits or drinking water for disadvantaged communities.
Given the inevitability of increasingly severe and lengthy droughts as the West's climate changes, it will be essential to provide incentives to collaborate on multibenefit projects that bring agricultural, environmental, and urban interests together to address the very serious challenge of maintaining sufficiently reliable water supply for all, including disadvantaged communities. This proposed legislation seeks to increase incentives for such needed collaboration.
I hope my colleagues will join me in support of this bill. ______
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source