Western Water and American Food Security Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from California for yielding me 2 minutes.

I strongly urge my colleagues to support the Western Water and American Food Security Act that we are debating here today.

Yes, we are debating this issue, and this is not new. What you have exhibited here and seen this morning is where the water fault lines lie in California, and it also is reflective of many of the Western States.

This 4 years of historic drought has pointed out clearly that we have a broken water system in California. Here we are on the floor, having another debate over whether or not we are going to pass a bill to help people because, at the end of the day, these are people problems, people problems in every region of California.

Nowhere have those people been more impacted than in the San Joaquin Valley, which much of us represent. These are families where parents have lost their jobs, whose children are not able to attend school. These are farmworkers, these are farm communities that have felt the most severe impact of this drought and the water constraints that we now are dealing with.

My colleagues on the Democratic side argue that this is simply a cause of 4 continuous dry years, and while that is partially true, it ignores that that talking point doesn't recognize that, in fact, we have a broken water system designed for 20 million people.

Communities in the San Joaquin Valley have seen their water supply reduced long term by 40 percent, and agricultural use has declined over the last 40 years because we are more efficient water users. Some, in my area, have had a zero water allocation the last 2 years. Zero, that is no water.

This reduced reliability has impacted every region of the State to be sure. It has impacted large metropolitan areas like the Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, San Diego, as well as the small rural and often disadvantaged communities like those in the valley that I represent.

This measure, H.R. 2898, takes a step toward addressing this longstanding imbalance by enhancing scientific management of the water projects in California and then giving it greater flexibility. It also provides additional storage.

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I thank the gentlewoman. It provides additional flexibility to increase our water supply. We have to use all the water tools in the water management toolbox, and that includes increasing storage capacity, and it is about time that we began doing that.

It also tries to address many of the other factors that are preventing the recovery of endangered species, like the invasive species that are the result of a lot of the decline in salmon in California.

Let me quote Karen Hesse, an author of ``Out of the Dust.'' She said: ``The way I see it, hard times aren't only about money or drought or dust. Hard times are about losing the spirit and hope and what happens when dreams dry up.''

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you that a lot of the dreams are drying up in the people that I represent in the San Joaquin Valley. This drought is crushing their spirit, making them feel as if their dreams never become a reality and too often feel like they are the country cousin, literally and figuratively, of the two urban areas in southern California and northern California.

The solution that California needs is not more talking points, but legislation working together on a bipartisan basis. This legislation starts that process. It is a work in progress. Obviously, it will be amended.

It will be changed as we work with the Senate later this fall.

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