What California Water Means to Whole Country

Floor Speech

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Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, let me talk a little bit more about California water and what it means to the whole country.

Now, we see here President Biden enjoying some ice cream there, as he is known to do. Mr. Speaker, ice cream comes from where? It comes from dairy products.

So, we need cows in order to make the dairy products to make cream, milk, butter, and things like that, part of which you would use to produce ice cream, which almost everybody enjoys. Our dairies in this country need to be supported, and they need not be exported to some other place to make basic things like milk and cream.

California is home to very happy cows, it has been said. Nonetheless, they are less happy having to move to Arizona and places like that due to our own State's horrific regulations.

Still, there are many strong dairies in the upper Midwest, Northeast, and all over the country, really. So we need cows for ice cream and milk. It is pretty basic. We have to remind people of that sometimes.

Mr. Speaker, what do cows need? They need feed. We need to grow the feed in our agricultural places, in our fields in every State and all around the country. Without feed and forage, we can't feed the cows, and we don't get ice cream.

Where do we get the feed, Mr. Speaker? We have to have land, and we have to have a water supply like this lake here. This depicts San Luis Reservoir in central California, which right now is about 68 or 70 percent full.

It should be taking advantage of all this massive rainfall and snowpack that might be melting already in some areas, flowing downhill out through the delta. They have a couple of sets of pumps there that could be running and filling this lake and topping it off.

It is not easy to top this reservoir off every single year. We were fortunate that we got it done last year, despite the water management that we have in government. There was so much water available that they were actually able to run the pumps long enough to fill the reservoir up to about its 2 million acre-feet capacity.

We have a ways to go to fill this reservoir in order to have the strongest possible position for agriculture going into this year so we have dairy, grain, and many other ag products that California is famous for growing.

Let's top off San Luis Reservoir. Let's get these pumps turned on to full blast while we have all this rain and runoff coming down the hill.

Instead, we have millions of acre-feet of water escaping into the oceans--millions. We don't have a water shortage in California. We have a management intelligence shortage. That is the problem.

I have Lake Oroville and Lake Shasta in my district, and they are both about 600 to 700 acre-feet short of being full, as we watch them run the spillways pretty strongly and let water out.

Yes, Mr. Speaker, I know they have to keep a gap at the top for flood control, but they are not using modern thinking on doing that. They need to be able to bring that.

Every day between now and April 1 is one less day of possible rain and possible inflow. They are looking at it as if we are going to overtop, perhaps, but if they don't get these lakes full by June 1 or so, then we are going to leave water on the table, so to speak, and leave agriculture out to dry.

Mr. Speaker, what do we do in order to increase water supply in California?

A couple of things are going on. Thankfully, this appropriations package coming up has $200 million of Federal money for Sites Reservoir in northern California, which would, once finally built, add 1.5 million acre-feet to the State's water supply.

We could have been filling it right now. With all the runoff, we would probably be 80 percent full if we had that facility there already. We could have been filling it out several times over the last few years.

We lose the opportunity because they are hemming and hawing in Sacramento, and lawsuits keep coming, and, oh, we have to talk about it and study it more.

When I took a tour of that 15 years ago, they said that if you can't build it here environmentally, then you can't build one anywhere.

This is Shasta Dam near Redding in northern California's Shasta County. This is part of the Federal CVP project that was built many years ago. This holds 4.5 million acre-feet when full. Right now, it is down about 700,000 to 800,000 acre-feet from capacity.

Yes, Mr. Speaker, I understand that you have to leave some room for flood capacity before the end of the season. Nonetheless, they are actually letting the water go down until the last day or so.

Are they guaranteeing that this lake is going to be full with that last 700,000 acre-feet by the end of the rainy season? I am not sure.

We also have an opportunity on top of that. Including building Sites Reservoir, we can also raise Shasta Dam about 18\1/2\ feet and add 640,000 acre-feet or so of new space. If that space was there right now, even if it doesn't fill, would mean they are not having to dump the water right now because you would have that extra capacity, that gap, for flood control. We would not be dumping and wasting this water.

On top of that, there are people in the Central Valley watching this water being dumped who are going to get only 15 percent of the requested water right of what they asked for. We need to build these.

Please follow facebook.com/groups/CaliforniaWaterForFoodMovement if you want to follow up, Mr. Speaker, and learn in plain language on social media how this works. It is a really good source that anybody can understand.

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