California Needs to Store Every Drop of Water We Can

Floor Speech

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Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I have spoken often here about California's water situation and how that directly relates to agriculture and why California agriculture is important to the whole country. There are many, many crops California grows. Between 90 and 100 percent of them come from California that U.S. consumers use and enjoy. If they are not grown in California, they are going to have to come from some other country because they are not really found in other parts of this country.

Do we want to be an importer of even more things that we depend on? We are already dependent enough on China and others for 90 percent of our pharmaceuticals. We are becoming more and more dependent on foreign energy, foreign oil, and gas. Why? Why are we doing this?

I will narrow it back down to the water situation. Last year, we had near-record rainfall and snowpack. It hadn't been better in many decades, and we were blessed by that. This year is a pretty good water and snowpack year as well, but at the same time that that is happening, they are releasing water out to the ocean and telling certain water districts in the San Joaquin Valley you are only going to get 15 percent of your allocation.

Imagine having any kind of business where you only get 15 percent of your inputs to operate at the same time when there is plenty of water.

Now, in northern California where my district is, we have Lake Shasta and Lake Oroville. Today is March 20. We are getting to the end of the winter precipitation season, and they are still dumping water over the spillways at these facilities at a time when Lake Shasta still has 600,000 acre-feet of space. Lake Oroville has 500,000 acre-feet of space.

For those that don't know, an acre-foot is enough to sustain about two households for a year or about three acres of crops. That is a lot of water that is being lost, I think, due to shortsightedness on planning what the flood season would look like. Indeed, in many cases, they are still using 50-year-old manuals to dictate how they should manage the lake for flood control.

I get that. We need to have that aspect. You save the top percentage of the lake for unplanned water influxes due to a heavy rain or a massive snowmelt. However, as we get closer and closer to this April 1 deadline or we get to the spring season, they still have wide gaps of available space for water on top of Shasta and Oroville and other reservoirs around the State.

Do we really expect we are going to get this massive influx of rain and snow that is going to top those off? Time and again, they over dump and under plan and, therefore, these lake levels are not topped off at 100 percent.

That to me should be the goal every year; flood control and, obviously, have the water for the uses that we want up and down the State. However, if you are not topping off every lake at 100 percent at one point in the offseason, then you leave water on the table.

They say that we got within 5 percent. That ain't bad, right? Well, 5 percent of a combined 8 million acre-feet on just those two lakes I mentioned is 400,000 acre-feet. That is enough to do one heck of a lot of crops that are being left on the table, especially when you are telling people down in the valley you are only going to get 15 percent of what used to be your normal allocation.

Why is it that the government cannot plan with our assets, with our resources better than that? Why are we using 50-year-old manuals to tell people they might have to be curtailed?

They are actually moving forward with this, 42 gallons per day per person in your households. They are not just ripping agriculture; it is going to be a dictation to people in their households in the urban areas.

I am really greatly concerned that not enough people are paying attention to this because if urban users, in-town users find out you only get 42 gallons per day--and it is surprising how many gallons per person is used when you do bathing and laundry, yes, you can wash your car, and yes, you can have a yard; they are trying to dictate you can't have those things either--all because we are not managing the water supply. We are not short of water. We are just short of imagination on how to properly manage it, and, yes, store more.

We have opportunities to build Sites Reservoir, which has been hanging out there for decades. Fortunately, we were able to get another $200 million for planning and moving the ball forward on building Sites Reservoir, which should hold 1\1/2\ million acre-feet.

If we had that reservoir already, even in dry years, we would be saving water. We would probably have over a million acre-feet in it right now this year--a million acre-feet that could be useable for something--environmental water, ag water, urban water.

People aren't used to being cut down to 42 gallons per person in a household. They are used to a number more like, maybe, 100 a day. Imagine what that is going to be like when folks are trying to do their normal business, and because we can't plan in government, we can't manage our supply. We can't manage to store more, so we just are going to make everybody conserve. There is nothing wrong with conservation, but you can't conserve what you don't have.

We have to count on record rainfall. We have to count on 125 percent every year and we can't do that every year. We have to plan, and we can plan. We don't have to be shortsighted.

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