SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
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67–477 DTP
2001
OVERSIGHT HEARING ON THE CALFED PROGRAM AND CALIFORNIA CENTRAL VALLEY PROJECT (CVP) OPERATIONS
OVERSIGHT HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON WATER AND POWER
of the
COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
MARCH 30, 2000, WASHINGTON, DC
Serial No. 106–88
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Printed for the use of the Committee on Resources
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/house
or
Committee address: http://www.resourcescommittee.house.gov
COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES
DON YOUNG, Alaska, Chairman
W.J. (BILLY) TAUZIN, Louisiana
JAMES V. HANSEN, Utah
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
ELTON GALLEGLY, California
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado
JOHN T. DOOLITTLE, California
WAYNE T. GILCHREST, Maryland
KEN CALVERT, California
RICHARD W. POMBO, California
BARBARA CUBIN, Wyoming
HELEN CHENOWETH-HAGE, Idaho
GEORGE P. RADANOVICH, California
WALTER B. JONES, Jr., North Carolina
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WILLIAM M. (MAC) THORNBERRY, Texas
CHRIS CANNON, Utah
KEVIN BRADY, Texas
JOHN PETERSON, Pennsylvania
RICK HILL, Montana
BOB SCHAFFER, Colorado
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana
GREG WALDEN, Oregon
DON SHERWOOD, Pennsylvania
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
MIKE SIMPSON, Idaho
THOMAS G. TANCREDO, Colorado
GEORGE MILLER, California
NICK J. RAHALL II, West Virginia
BRUCE F. VENTO, Minnesota
DALE E. KILDEE, Michigan
PETER A. DeFAZIO, Oregon
ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American Samoa
NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii
SOLOMON P. ORTIZ, Texas
OWEN B. PICKETT, Virginia
FRANK PALLONE, Jr., New Jersey
CALVIN M. DOOLEY, California
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CARLOS A. ROMERO-BARCELÓ, Puerto Rico
ROBERT A. UNDERWOOD, Guam
PATRICK J. KENNEDY, Rhode Island
ADAM SMITH, Washington
CHRIS JOHN, Louisiana
DONNA MC CHRISTENSEN, Virgin Islands
RON KIND, Wisconsin
JAY INSLEE, Washington
GRACE F. NAPOLITANO, California
TOM UDALL, New Mexico
MARK UDALL, Colorado
JOSEPH CROWLEY, New York
RUSH D. HOLT, New Jersey
LLOYD A. JONES, Chief of Staff
ELIZABETH MEGGINSON, Chief Counsel
CHRISTINE KENNEDY, Chief Clerk/Administrator
JOHN LAWRENCE, Democratic Staff Director
Subcommittee on Water and Power Resources
JOHN T. DOOLITTLE, California, Chairman
KEN CALVERT, California
RICHARD W. POMBO, California
HELEN CHENOWETH-HAGE, Idaho
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GEORGE P. RADANOVICH, California
WILLIAM M. (MAC) THORNBERRY, Texas
GREG WALDEN, Oregon
MIKE SIMPSON, Idaho
CALVIN M. DOOLEY, California
GEORGE MILLER, California
PETER A. DeFAZIO, Oregon
OWEN B. PICKETT, Virginia
ADAM SMITH, Washington
DONNA MC CHRISTENSEN, Virgin Islands
GRACE F. NAPOLITANO, California
ROBERT FABER, Staff Director/Counsel
JOSHUA JOHNSON, Professional Staff
STEVE LANICH, Minority Staff
C O N T E N T S
Hearing held March 30, 2000
Statement of Members:
Condit, Hon. Gary A., a Representative in Congress from the State of California
Dooley, Hon. Calvin M., a Representative in Congress from the State of California
Doolittle, Hon. John T., a Representative in Congress from the State of California
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Herger, Hon. Wally, a Representative in Congress from the State of California
Prepared Statement of
Ose, Hon. Doug, a Representative in Congress from the State of California
Statement of Witnesses:
Bamert, Edward ''Tom'', Chairman, Regional Council of Rural Counties (RCRC), Jackson, California
Prepared Statement of
Bishop, Wally, General Manager, Contra Costa Water District, Concord, California
Prepared Statement of
Bradley, Justin, Interim Environmental Director, Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group, San Jose, California
Prepared Statement of
Davis, Grant, Executive Director, The Bay Institute, San Rafael, California
Prepared Statement of
Hannigan, Tom, Director, California Department of Water Resources
Prepared Statement of
Hayes, David, Deputy Secretary, Department of the Interior, Washington, DC
Prepared Statement of
Moss, Richard M., General Manager, Friant Water Users Authority, Lindsay, California
Prepared Statement of
Nomellini, Dante John, Manager and Co-Counsel, Central Delta Water Agency, Stockton, California
Prepared Statement of
Southwick, Brenda, Associate Counsel, California Farm Bureau Federation, Sacramento, California
Prepared Statement of
Sprague, Stan, General Manager, Orange County Municipal Water District, Fountain Valley, California
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Prepared Statement of
Tenney, O.L. ''Van'', General Manager, Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, Willows, California
Prepared Staement of
Yardas, David, Senior Scientist, Environmental Defense Fund, Oakland, California
Prepared Statement of
Wilson, Larry, Board of Directors, Santa Clara Valley Water District, San Jose, California
Prepared Statement of
OVERSIGHT HEARING ON THE CALFED PROGRAM
AND CALIFORNIA CENTRAL VALLEY PROJECT (CVP)
OPERATIONS
THURSDAY, MARCH 30, 2000
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Water and Power,
Committee on Resources,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:06 a.m., in room 1334, Longworth House Office Building, Hon. John T. Doolittle (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. The Subcommittee on Water and Power will come to order. We are meeting today to hear testimony on the CALFED program and the California Central Valley Project Operations.
I know most of our members are familiar with this rule, but I just want to reiterate it today that the oral opening statements are limited to the chairman and the ranking minority member, and this is for the purpose of hearing all the testimony and allowing everybody to meet their travel schedules at the end of the day. All members' statements will certainly be included in full in the written record.
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Let me ask unanimous consent—I have extended an invitation today to all of the members representing the Central Valley to join us here on the dais—and I see none of them at present, but I do believe they will be here. Is there objection to that request?
[No response.]
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Seeing none, that will be granted.
STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN T. DOOLITTLE, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Water, obviously, is vital for all of California, and over the last 5 years we have held a variety of hearings in the management of Central Valley Water. This hearing today on CALFED and CVP Operations continues the debate on how Congress will address these important issues.
As many of you are aware, since the 1996 authorization for CALFED, the Subcommittee on Water and Power has asked for specific information regarding the CALFED budget, ecosystem standards and criteria and how the future water supply needs of California will be met.
I expect, today, to hear from a diverse group of water users in California who will provide their insight on, one, the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the cross-cut budget prepared by the Department of the Interior and the State of California. One of those charts facing the audience displays that, and the members will shortly have their own copy; two, how effective the CALFED program has been; three, what modifications to the CALFED authorization are necessary to support an extension; and, four, what steps should be undertaken to improve the reliability and water quality of CVP water deliveries.
Today, I will address four areas of specific interest to this subcommittee:
One, CALFED financing. First, we need to ensure that CALFED funding is spent responsibly. As many of you are aware, the Federal CALFED funding experiment has allowed hundreds of millions of dollars in appropriations without the Congress knowing how the money would be spent. We were continually told that CALFED could handle such funds, even though it was a startup operation.
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The current picture is of a program unable to manage the money provided. Of the $430-million authorization, $210 million has been appropriated. And as of the Department's last report, the expenditures from that appropriation of $210 million are a mere $35 million. Specific goals for those expenditures remain lacking, and a clear, transparent crosscut budgeting system has yet to be developed. The subcommittee is concerned that the Federal agencies involved in the CALFED program are not coordinating the myriad of activities going on in the watersheds under restoration.
Two, getting better together. Under the Bay-Delta Accord, there was a general understanding that the time had come to improve the environment, establish reliable water supplies and improve water quality. However, since that time, water users have actually lost 300,000 acre-feet of water from the system. Water quality remains a concern based on the operation of the system. And while a great deal of money has been appropriated for environmental restoration, we lack the kind of good science and coordinated operation which should be a foundation for this effort.
Three, augmentation of our current water supply. Our existing water management systems can no longer provide a sufficient reliable water supply to meet the needs of both the environment and of our current water users. How can we support a thriving business community, a growing urban population and an agricultural economy worth billions of dollars if we can't even meet our current needs? Over the last 3 years, we have had to curtail water use in several parts of the State not because of a shortage of water, but because of a lack of ability to restore water. We are in, currently, our sixth wet year in California, and it appears that nobody, on either the Federal or State level, is willing to address what will happen during the first year of a drought. If we can't make contracted deliveries to water users in wet years, I can't imagine what will happen in times of merely an average water year or, indeed, of a drought.
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Four, regulatory certainty. The Congress and the American public are watching the CALFED experiment to determine if the CVPIA, ESA and Clean Water Act can be carried out in a way that does not play brinkmanship with the water that people need each day for drinking, for industry and for agriculture. If those laws can't be made to work in this case, they can't work anywhere. While it is fine to discuss the need for future water projects, there are short-term reforms necessary to sustain ecosystem restoration, as well as water development.
One, there is broad administrative discretion in meeting environmental laws. We have seen this discretion exercised in ways that have minimal or no benefit on the environment and significant negative impacts on water users. Discretion must be exercised to increase contract water supplies up to the contract amount.
Two, administrative discretion should be exercised to minimize the adverse economic consequences of enforcing the CVPIA, ESA and the Clean Water Act.
Three, the Government needs to make sure that only existing peer-reviewed science is used as a basis for administrative decisions.
Four, a commitment must be made that there will be no additional loss of water deliveries. Any new water for environmental purposes must be provided by the agencies as a public benefit paid for by the public.
Five, if an Environmental Water Account is identified, it should be used in lieu of rather than in addition to current curtailments of water supplies.
And, six, the Federal Government should immediately work with the State of California to develop a plan for more flexible operations that will improve water quality and supply.
I look forward to hearing the testimony and discussing the future of California's water management with the witnesses. And I will recognize our ranking member, Mr. Dooley, for his opening statement.
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STATEMENT OF HON. CALVIN M. DOOLEY, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA
Mr. DOOLEY. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for holding this hearing today to review the status of the CALFED process and the implementation of the CVPIA Act. These two efforts are closely interwoven and both will have a profound impact on the future of California. I would also like to thank our witnesses today for their participation in this important hearing.
Obviously, my constituents have been deeply impacted by the CVPIA and have been active participants in the CALFED process because they recognize that resolving the environmental problems associated with water project development is a key to restoring and ensuring an adequate and reliable water supply for the future. They are anxiously awaiting the completion of the CALFED report. The prescription for meeting California's long-term water needs must balance the interests of municipal, industrial, agricultural and environmental stakeholders.
Any solution will require significantly more water storage than what is currently available. A collaborative process, such as CALFED, remains the most effective mechanism for developing a long-term solution that addresses California's water supply and water quality needs while simultaneously protecting and restoring the State's unique ecosystems.
From my perspective, a well-functioning process is a balanced one that produces tangible benefits for all participating stakeholders. It is clear to me, as I hope it is to all of those involved, that this process will not succeed if major concerns of key stakeholders remain unaddressed. It is also important that we recognize that all policy decisions affecting California's water supply have an impact on our ability to devise a long-term solution.
I have been impressed and encouraged by the cooperative spirit displayed by the stakeholders with respect to the appropriations request. I also greatly appreciate remarks and recent intense efforts by Secretary Babbitt which demonstrate his continued commitment to a balanced process that addresses water supply and quality concerns.
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I look forward to the continued leadership from Secretary Babbitt, Secretary Nichols, Governor Davis, the stakeholders and the members of this committee as we move together toward a balanced, long-lasting response to California's water supply and water quality needs.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. I note that Mr. Condit has joined us, one of the very key representatives in the Central Valley who has been invited to sit up here. I have always thought you belonged on this side of the aisle Gary.
[Laughter.]
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Let me call up our first panel out of three and invite them to come forward and remain standing. Would you please raise your right hands.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Thank you. Let the record reflect each answered affirmatively. And, gentlemen, please be seated. We are very pleased to have you here.
We will begin today. I think you are all familiar with the 5-minute rule, and those lights are provided as a guide. You don't have to cutoff in midsentence, but we do have three panels, and there is some major testimony and questions to be asked, so we are a little bit under the constraint of time. Plus, we will have, I might just announce, in approximately 15 minutes or so, we will have a vote, and then the rest of the votes I guess will be rolled until 12:30 or so. So, hopefully, we can conduct our business pretty well uninterrupted except for those two occasions.
Our first witness will be Mr. Richard M. Moss, who is the general manager of the Friant Water Users Authority. Mr. Moss?
STATEMENT OF RICHARD M. MOSS, GENERAL MANAGER, FRIANT WATER USERS AUTHORITY, LINDSAY, CALIFORNIA
Mr. MOSS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
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The Friant Water Users Authority consists of 25 member agencies that all receive water from the Friant Division of the Central Valley Project. The Friant Division diverts from the San Joaquin River northeast of Fresno. Our members annually deliver about a million-and-a-half acre-feet to some one million acres of farmland and some of the most productive farmland in the world generating approximately $4 billion in agricultural production at the farm gate each year.
The Friant Division directly diverts water from the San Joaquin River, which is otherwise tributary to the Delta. We also indirectly are dependent upon export pumping of the Central Valley Project from the Delta to meet prior water rights obligations that allow us to divert the water at Friant Dam. This otherwise is known as the exchange supply. Thus, we have great interest in any actions that may affect our ability to divert water from the San Joaquin River or that may affect our ability to have the Central Valley Project provide that exchange supply.
I should also note that we are working very hard with environmental interests and others pursuing restoration of the upper main stem of the San Joaquin River from Friant Dam to its confluence with the Merced, a project which I believe will have significant implications in the future for CALFED. It is, thus, for these reasons that my agency and my constituency is extremely interested in CALFED and seeing CALFED be a success.
We, like the committee, are all ears, waiting for Governor Davis and Secretary of Interior Babbitt's negotiations to culminate and to provide us with their decisions. Given that these are closed-door negotiations, all we can do is provide the negotiators with a very clear understanding of what we believe must be in the final solution. And with this committee's help, maybe they will be able to hear our message.
Let me now focus briefly on three aspects of the CALFED situation, the CALFED solution that we believe must be there at the end of the day:
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No. 1, and, Mr. Chairman, you mentioned it already, is regulatory certainty. We need that now. We don't need that years from now. We have witnessed a steady diminishment over the past several years of the ability of the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project to deliver good quality water from the Delta. Virtually all of this has been as a result of regulatory actions under the CVPIA or the Endangered Species Act. We now hear that more cuts are in the offing, and this situation is clearly untenable. There has to be some stability from which we and CALFED can build. Without a foundation of stability, CALFED will fail. CALFED simply cannot build new water supply as fast as they have the ability to take it away.
Let me give you a sense of the magnitude of the problem. We could spend three-quarters of a billion dollars on raising Friant Dam and maybe generate 150,000 acre-feet of new yield, clearly a project that I am in support of. But last year, because of the Delta smelt, we saw reductions in Delta export pumping and the creation of a 350,000 acre foot hole in San Louis reservoir clearly putting San Joaquin Valley agriculture at risk, including the Santa Clara Valley and the industry that they support as well, from a water quality standpoint.
Now, we are faced with the potential of Trinity River impacts of some 250,000 acre-feet or more, and we hear earlier this week that the Fish and Wildlife Service is looking for another 400,000 acre-feet of water before they can provide us some base of regulatory certainty. CALFED can't meet these new demands, much less return the water that was lent to stabilize endangered species, supposedly, under the 1994 Bay-Delta Accord.
No. 2 on my list is the need for more storage, in particular more surface storage. We need more storage north of the Delta, in or adjacent to the Delta, south of the Delta and on the San Joaquin River. This new storage must be real. We are not interested in storage way off in the future or a list of storage sites that is nothing more than a list of things that we are going to have to fight over in the future. We are particularly interested in seeing new storage on the San Joaquin River system that we would hope would generate new yield, for Upper San Joaquin River restoration, for new freshwater flows into the Delta, for South Delta water quality, export water quality, flood control and hopefully to offset our chronic groundwater overdraft in the San Joaquin Valley that is in excess of a million acre-feet a year.
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Lastly, I want to bring to your attention the fledgling restoration effort on the Upper San Joaquin River. CALFED and the State and Federal agencies have been very supportive of our efforts to date, and for that we are very grateful. They provided us $2.5 million last year on very short notice for a pilot project that allowed summertime flows on the San Joaquin River for riparian habitat. This project facilitated the gathering of some very important data and more importantly it brought some disparate interests together that had not been working together for a long time and actually had been fighting and litigating.
We are now embarking on, in cooperation with our new environmental friends, on some studies that will look at what it is going to take to restore the river and where that water will come from. And we are going to need CALFED's continued support and the CALFED agencies' support from a technical and financial basis. We ultimately will need to integrate this effort in with the CALFED solution to make sure it works for everyone on the long term.
Thank you for your attention. I would be pleased to answer any questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Moss follows:]
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Thank you. Our next witness will be Mr. Tom Bamert, who I am pleased to note is a constituent of mine and serves as the chairman of the Regional Council of Rural Counties.
Mr. Bamert?
STATEMENT OF EDWARD ''TOM'' BAMERT, CHAIRMAN, REGIONAL COUNCIL OF RURAL COUNTIES [RCRC], JACKSON, CALIFORNIA
Mr. BAMERT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee. I want to thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony on behalf of the Regional Council of Rural Counties to the subcommittee regarding CALFED.
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As you said, I am Supervisor Tom Bamert, chairman of the Regional Council of Rural Counties. We are an organization of 28 rural Northern California counties. Our membership encompasses a broad geographic area, which includes all or portions of Congressmen Doolittle, Radanovich, Herger, Pombo, Ose, Farr, Condit, Lewis and Thompson's districts. It is from our membership area that over 80 percent of the water for the Delta comes.
RCRC has participated in the CALFED Bay-Delta Program since early 1996. The CALFED program, when initiated, promised to balance this program within objectives for ecosystem restoration, water supply reliability, water quality and levee system integrity. Based upon our review of the CALFED programmatic draft EIS and EIR, RCRC no longer believes that the CALFED program can be expected to deliver a workable solution for any of those objectives which has any expectation of a success.
Our concerns focus on a domination of the process by the Federal Government to the detriment of the State of California and its local Governments and people. For example, CALFED identifies a number of programs which will adversely affect the land and the people of the CALFED solution area.
This strategy calls for implementation actions which will purchase up to 100,000 acre-feet of PG&E reservoir reoperation water. This water, in many cases, was proposed to be used by our member counties for their own water supplies and not for export to the Delta and beyond. In the upland areas, as you know, without this reoperation water, and in the absence of new on-stream storage, there is no viable water supply for many of the people in Mr. Doolittle's, Mr. Herger's or Mr. Radanovich's districts. Most of these areas have no reliable groundwater sources.
Another proposal in the same document boldly calls for shifting our Sacramento Valley counties' people and farms off of surface water and onto groundwater. This is a clear indication that CALFED and its member agencies are attempting to end-run California law, which provides that counties can regulate groundwater extraction and export.
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Both of these programs would use CALFED appropriations to purchase assets away from the people in rural California and our local economies. Federal reauthorization of appropriations for CALFED thus becomes a very real danger to rural California's interests.
A later CALFED implementation strategy is the Madera Ranch groundwater storage project in one of our member counties. This project is opposed by the Madera County Farm Bureau, the Madera Irrigation District and the Friant Water Users Association. In addition, the Madera County board of supervisors has expressed serious concerns regarding environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the proposal on their land and citizens. Regardless of these expressions of local concern and outright opposition, the CALFED program, working within the Federal budget authorization, lists this project for implementation. Apparently, local opposition or local conditions have no influence on the Federal agencies running the CALFED program.
CALFED's crosscut budget demonstrates that, for the most part, the CALFED appropriation will be used to supplement the budget of its member agencies in ways to harm our member counties. The funds will be used to acquire land and water, study the removal of dams and create river meander zones. The land, once acquired, is taken off the tax roles, and the Federal Government is soon delinquent in its payments. One of Congressman Ose's counties, Colusa, reported last week that the Federal Government is nearly $900,000 in arrears on their Federal lands.
The CALFED program is literally buying the ground out from under our counties, as well as the water that originates there. Even more troubling is that when the water is purchased for environmental use or exports south of the Delta, it is forever lost, with no replacement for our communities.
In summary, the CALFED program is using rural California as offsite mitigation for environmental problems in the Delta. By reauthorizing this program, you folks will be throwing your support against your own constituents back home.
We have been asked by this committee to provide our advice as to what modifications should be made to the CALFED program if reauthorization is warranted. We wish to go on record as stating that we do not believe reauthorization is warranted. The program is, we believe, so far out of line with the intentions of the local populations and their elected leaders that it will face fierce opposition in future implementation.
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RCRC has been actively working with other interests from throughout the State to attempt to develop a framework for a solution to the State's water and natural resource problems. We worked with these parties on Prop 13, which will provide nearly $2 billion in funds for projects to be carried out by the State and local interests to produce real projects, to produce real benefits to the people of California.
We have been told by Mr. David Hays of the U.S. Department of the Interior that there will be a CALFED Record of Decision this summer. That action will release an additional $390 million from a previously passed State bond, Prop 204.
The question then is: What will we do without CALFED?
Without CALFED, we will still have nearly $2.3 billion in funds to spend on improving our environment and solving water resources problems in California.
Without CALFED, there will be less money available to convert our counties into Federal land holdings and water projects run by bureaucrats. There will be less money to buy the last remaining water resources in our counties for use elsewhere.
None of our real resource problems will go away, but many of our governance problems and Federal domination problems will be minimized.
Without CALFED, we will need a strong leadership from within our own State to carry this effort forward. We, as representatives of 28 counties, look forward to solving these problems. We are willing to work with State leadership and any others willing to put in the effort back home. We are willing to work with those same Federal regulators, those same CALFED agencies in a new State-led process without CALFED.
Thank you for this opportunity.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Bamert follows:]
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Thank you.
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Our next witness will be Mr. Stan Sprague, general manager of the Orange County Municipal Water District.
Mr. Sprague?
STATEMENT OF STAN SPRAGUE, GENERAL MANAGER, ORANGE COUNTY MUNICIPAL WATER DISTRICT, FOUNTAIN VALLEY, CALIFORNIA
Mr. SPRAGUE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. I am here today representing the California Urban Water Agencies, which is 12 of the larger urban agencies in California. They represent about 22 million people or at least they provide water to that 22 million people and the economy that is associated with that.
Just to give a little bit of background, what we have seen over the last 4 years is the California voters have said that they want to ensure a healthy environment and a safe, clean, reliable water supply, as evidenced by the passage of Prop 204 and Prop 13. Combined, that is about $3 billion worth of authorization.
To date, the Federal Government has appropriated a little over $200 million for CALFED out of a $400 million-plus authorization. They have spent, to this point, about $109 million toward ecosystem projects and $30 million to nonecosystem projects.
We needed to start with the fish. We need to get recovery going. Recovery has happened. Science is showing that recovery is happening. We need to now move forward in a more planned way and not in a panic mode for the purposes of planning how we continue with recovery, but let us move some of those dollars now and the activities into a more balanced strategy.
The package must contain, as we look to the future, contain regulatory certainty; meaning Federal agencies need to drop the single focus on fish. They need to include water quality and supply reliability improvements in a balanced package with the environment. Right now, we have actions without science and science without actions.
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To respond to some of the questions that the chairman sent to me, with regards to the crosscut budget, Congress should be concerned about the slow rate of expenditures and the lag time between appropriations. However, public works projects of this nature do take time. For us in the water community, we are concerned about the lack of projects to address water quality and supply reliability for the water users of the system. We want to see water quality projects and water supply projects funded on a par with the ecosystem projects, which right now your tables don't show that that's the case.
With regards to how effective has CALFED been, scientific data shows that fish are recovering from their low levels of the eighties and nineties. The funding for the ecosystem restoration efforts have been effective. Now we have seen what CALFED has proposed in their draft EIR/EIS that was released last summer, and we have our doubts. I don't know that many people in California that provided a great deal of support for that strategy and that package.
However, currently, the State and Federal negotiators are our last glimmer of hope for CALFED will develop a package that we can support. Again, scientific data is weak to justify the notion that the pumps are the problem. Single focus of pump restrictions to enhance fishery recovery will not help the agencies who have—and I am talking about the Federal agencies—who have a goal of doubling the fish population. In fact, science shows that they cannot achieve that fish doubling by simply dealing with the pumps.
Modifications to CALFED authorization was your third question. I would rephrase it, should we continue with CALFED, we are hopeful that the State and Federal negotiations will develop a positive package that we can support. So the answer is we are in ''wait and see'' mode, and we need to see the package. We have heard that State and Federal negotiators are talking about an Environmental Water Account that could cost water users an additional million acre-feet above the amount which the accord took, and we all agreed to.
If the Environmental Water Account tools are used just for the environment, this will squeeze the water users to a point where there will be no flexibility in the system to improve water quality or supply reliability.
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Mr. Chairman, I would be happy to answer any questions you have. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Sprague follows:]
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Thank you.
Our final witness in this panel will be the Honorable Tom Hannigan, with whom I had the pleasure of serving once in the California legislature, and he is now our director of the California Department of Water Resources.
Mr. Hannigan?
STATEMENT OF TOM HANNIGAN, DIRECTOR, CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF WATER RESOURCES
Mr. HANNIGAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you for the opportunity to present information regarding the status of water conditions for the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project, the current discussions with the Department of Interior regarding stabilizing and improving water supply reliability for the near future, and the long term and the extension of the CALFED program.
As you may know, Governor Davis has assigned a State team to work with Interior Secretary Babbitt on developing more specifics for the CALFED program. Meetings began 2 months ago and are scheduled to continue for at least two more meetings between now and the end of April. In addition to resolving ongoing operational issues, the larger goal has been to reach conceptual agreement on some of the specifics for implementation within the permanent CALFED program. We had a productive meeting on Monday of this week, at which we discussed Delta conveyance issues and details of a workable Environmental Water Account.
The EWA is a concept whereby the needs of endangered fish to ultimately reach recovery can be accomplished by the environment acquiring water in a nonregulatory manner. We contemplate that the EWA would develop storage and new water supplies, participate in a water transfers market and use water project operational flexibility tools to provide more stable fishery protection without loss of additional water from urban and agricultural water users.
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Topics that we expect to discuss at meetings over the next month include water storage, the ecosystem restoration program, water transfers, water quality, an overall Endangered Species Act assurances package, water use efficiency, financing and governance, and further details on how we can begin to develop the concept of the EWA into a real program. Finally, we need to deal with how science and long-term monitoring fit into the program, since we all want to be sure that expenditure of resources and money is focused on real improvements for the environment and water users.
It is clear from discussions to date that early implementation of meaningful programs is essential. The CALFED Final Programmatic EIR/EIS and the accompanying record of decision this summer will end the 5-year CALFED ''planning'' program and begin the ''doing.'' The State-Federal discussions are intended to fine-tune what will be in the ROD and provide policy guidance for CALFED implementation. Continuing studies will be necessary in some areas consistent with making sure we implement the program using the best scientific understanding.
The Department, as well as the Governor, supports extending the CALFED funding authorization of $430 million enacted in 1996. We view this as essential to maintaining the momentum of the program. The State has $390 million waiting to fund CALFED ecosystem actions upon the certification of the program's environmental documents. In addition, as has been stated, California voters passed Proposition 13 this month that provides $1.97 billion for a variety of key water programs, including $250 million to fund projects identified in the EIS/EIR as CALFED Stage 1 actions. Extension of the Federal authorization for CALFED funding is necessary to maintain the Federal share of support for the program. And as you know, Federal agencies have requested a 3-year extension in the President's budget proposal.
Last year, Secretary Nichols submitted a comprehensive reauthorization plan to this subcommittee. The plan proposes to extend CALFED for an additional year, through fiscal year 2001. The plan also calls for two-thirds of the appropriated funds to be directed toward ecosystem restoration projects, and one-third for other program elements. In addition, the legislative language includes a provision requiring CALFED to provide quarterly reports to Congress that include information as of the list of projects underway, status of each project expressed as a percentage of the whole, estimated date of completion and local participating agencies and lead Federal agencies. Bottom line, our proposal represents a balanced approach to CALFED, and we believe it is a good start.
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The 1994 Bay-Delta Accord helped to stabilize the water supply reliability of both of California's largest water projects while we developed a longer term plan through CALFED. As you know, the past 5 years has not proven as stable as we hoped. Implementation of (b)(2) of the 1992 CVPIA reallocated 800,000 acre-feet of water from CVP water uses to environmental purposes. ''Take'' restrictions due to conflicts between our Delta water diversions and endangered fish species disrupted water project operations in an unpredictable manner resulting in adverse impacts to both water supplies and quality. The bottom line is that we need CALFED to be a success in order for us to restore the level of reliability we once enjoyed in our developed water supplies.
Water conditions in California have improved dramatically since the end of this year. December 1999 was one of the driest on record and prompted all of us to worry about what the future held for our supply. Today I am pleased to report that water contractors for the State water project are to receive 100 percent of their requested deliveries this year. Deliveries to the CVP contractors have also improved. CVP ag contracts in the San Joaquin Valley that are impacted by the implementation of (b)(2) were recently told their deliveries have increased from 50 to 60 percent. This increase was due largely to State water project pumping water for the CVP earlier this year. The Department of Water Resources continues to work closely with the Bureau of Reclamation to coordinate the operation.
I think, due to time, I will conclude at that and look forward to your questions. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hannigan follows:]
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Thank you very much. Mr. Hannigan——
Mr. HANNIGAN. Yes?
Mr. DOOLITTLE. If we were to see next year the beginning of a new 5-year drought like we had in the years 1987 through 1992, and no one knows when that will happen, but what do you think, what would happen to us in California if we entered into another drought like we had? That was I think one of the worst ones in 50 years, but such things have been known to happen. I am just wondering, as the director of Water Resources, with the expertise available to you, the increase in our population that has occurred since then, how do you think our industries would fare and our population in such a circumstance?
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Mr. HANNIGAN. Mr. Chairman, first of all, the experts available to me told me that we should not expect a sixth wet year. And when it didn't rain in December, I immediately formed a, I'll use the ''D'' word, group within the Department to start planning for a drought. And lo and behold, we are now going to enjoy a sixth wet year. But the fact of the matter is there are a couple of things that I think come into play if, in fact, we experience a 5-year drought.
It will be painful because many of the things we are discussing in CALFED can't come on line as quickly as a 5-year drought. I think we benefit from the experience of the last drought. And agencies like Metropolitan in Southern California have led the way in developing alternatives and insurance against a drought. I think we will see that lessen in some degree the impacts of a drought. But there is no question that if we don't have additional resources, the ability to offset a drought would be severely limited.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. I think we all know agriculture would be severely hit because even in these so-called wet years, they have been severely hit.
Mr. HANNIGAN. No question.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. But what would be the impact, say, on Silicon Valley, in your estimation, if we go into another big drought?
Mr. HANNIGAN. Well, Santa Clara Water Agency, who serves the Silicon Valley, as I understand their operation, do have some flexibility. But they rely heavily on water from San Luis, their entitlement in the State Water Project. And as you probably know, in 1999, because of the Delta smelt problem early in the year, San Luis was drawn down to a dangerously low point, which is threatening all of the water users below the pumps, Santa Clara the most. So they would have a hard time dealing with that 5-year drought. I trust their flexibility in their own system would buffer some of the potential impacts, but clearly if we can't keep San Luis at a level that meets their water demand request, they would experience some negative impacts.
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Mr. DOOLITTLE. It is my understanding they have to have a certain level of water quality in order to be able to——
Mr. HANNIGAN. That is correct. And as the level of San Luis drops, the water quality diminishes and that is what impacts them.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Thank you.
Mr. Bamert, I hope, ultimately, if we should reauthorize CALFED, you won't feel that with the conditions that we impose we won't be destroying the rural way of life. That certainly wouldn't be our intention. But I do observe that I think Mr. Sprague mentioned that $113 million had been obligated. That is true it has been obligated, but out of that, even only the total of, according to our figures, only $35 million has been spent. So you have got millions of dollars out there that even if CALFED went away at the Federal level, there is lots of money out there already that will be spent eventually.
So one of the benefits of a reauthorization, from that standpoint, would be to gain improved use of the money that has already been appropriated, and to get better accountability, and hopefully to accomplish something that we are all seeking. But I appreciate your forthright testimony. I think you conveyed clearly the depth of frustration, the depth of sentiment there is out there with reference to what has or hasn't already happened.
You mentioned storage. Would you just comment, representing many of those counties, which are Upland areas, sources of much of this water, what are your storage needs?
Mr. BAMERT. Well, Mr. Chairman, I am from a small county, Amador County, as you know, and the amount of water we need is only 10,000 acre-feet. That will carry us on almost to the end of this century. But being above the dams, with little groundwater, we do not have the opportunity to participate in the State Water Project or the Central Valley Project to obtain additional water. So we need to retain that water above the dams that are now exporting our water to the East Bay and other areas.
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You mentioned the money that is in the CALFED process. Part of the problem is we are not getting that money up in the water shed areas above the dams, which we think will produce additional supplies of water for the rest of the State. But our main concern is maintaining our area of origin rights so that we have water maintained in our counties for the future. That is about it, I guess.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Mr. Sprague, you represent a major urban area, critical to serve them. Are you concerned about the immediate future in terms of what you are going to be able to produce for your customers in the next year or two?
Mr. SPRAGUE. Yes. But possibly in a different way. If I am looking at it strictly from my own agency in Southern California, a member of the Metropolitan Water District, we have a little advantage. We have the Colorado River system, and assuming that it works, probably through conservation and so on, we have the ability to survive. But I can see where other portions of the urban community don't have that same looped system. Every single local retail water agency is able to get water from a variety of sources, even if they just have a looped pipeline system.
And so it is going to be a challenge to some of the other areas. We are certainly concerned. There has been a lot of effort done, not just in the Metropolitan service area, but throughout urban California in the area of water use efficiency, and that is going to help us, to some degree. But without the certainty, as you continue to add demands on our system and we continue to try to improve water-use efficiency, the elasticity in the system starts to disappear, and that is one of our concerns with the lack of an understanding of what this package is going to be able to deliver over the long haul, so that we have some certainty to manage or develop our planning strategies.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Thank you.
Mr. Moss, do you feel a good deal of the elasticity has already disappeared in this system? I mean, by the way, we are going to lose some of that Colorado River water here shortly I understand.
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Mr. MOSS. Certainly the elasticity has been taken. You asked about another 5-year drought. The last drought began and CVP supplies on the West side were able to be sustained at 100-percent of deliveries for the first 3 years of the drought. That condition no longer exists, obviously. We are in a wet year. We are not in a drought. They are getting 50, maybe 60, percent of their supplies. And if we had the conditions that we are currently under and faced another drought, those water supplies would drop to zero. So the elasticity is gone. We don't have the flexibility now to find water, to manage water, in ways that allowed us to manage a drought.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Thank you.
Mr. Dooley is recognized for his questions.
Mr. DOOLEY. Thank you.
Mr. Hannigan, we have been very pleased with the Governor's commitment and participation in the CALFED process. I would just like to clarify is the Governor, in your role, approaching this with the objective that, through this process, that all of the stakeholders can get better, including the environmental interests and municipal, agricultural users?
Mr. HANNIGAN. That is correct.
Mr. DOOLEY. I guess then when we are proceeding with that as our objective and really our commitment, Mr. Sprague mentioned some concerns about the environmental water count, and some of my constituents have also expressed some concerns. They think that there might be some merit in concept of what is happening there. But when we start talking about an additional 400,000 acre-feet or whatever the number is to be put into an environmental water count, where is that water going to come from and how is it not going to have a negative impact on some of the existing users, whether they be Mr. Sprague's constituents or Mr. Moss's or even Westland's irrigation district, which currently, in a very wet year, is receiving 60 percent of their contracted supply? Where does this water from come and how can they have any assurance that this isn't going to be a further reduction in their deliveries?
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Mr. HANNIGAN. The concept of the environmental water count is to develop, if you will, a budget for the environment. And earlier, one of the witnesses used the figure 400,000 acre-feet. So let's just use that for a moment because there is some accuracy to that number. There is water that will be acquired by purchase, in large part State and Federal resources purchasing the water and storing, renting initially, ultimately benefiting from additional storage facilities, in part. We envision that if a new storage facility is constructed, that a portion of its capacity would be purchased by the environmental water budget, if you will.
So in the short term, we are trying to figure out how to put together an environmental water count in the range of 400,000 acre-feet of water through purchase and then store, you know, wet year water moved into storage, available in less than wet years, and then sustain that number over a period of time. In return for that, water users would be given assurances that not any of their supplies would be diminished as a result of environmental actions.
Mr. DOOLEY. And how could you provide those assurances when we still have existing Federal and State environmental laws, be they ESA, Clean Water Act?
Mr. HANNIGAN. Well, there are, and here again that is a topic of these discussions. There are, in law, environmental ''takes,'' if you will. The Delta Accord that was referred to has a water value to it for the environment, the CVPIA, your Federal legislation, has a figure of 800,000 acre-feet per year of water attached to it, and then there are some existing biological opinions, under the ESA, that are in place. And we are recognizing, trying to recognize, those existing environmental water sources and adding to that, but not taking it from the water users. We are trying to give them assurances that they will be able to count on, subject to hydrology, count on a water budget that exists today, and hopefully is improved upon through CALFED over a long period of time.
Mr. DOOLEY. I guess, Mr. Moss, I would like you to perhaps respond. As Mr. Hannigan lays this out, that there appears that this might have some benefit, what are your concerns related to this proposal?
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Mr. MOSS. Think of the size, 400,000 acre-feet. Let me give you a little real-time experience. This past summer, as part of a pilot project for the San Joaquin River, I had the task of that project of going out and finding 15,000 acre-feet in the San Joaquin Valley to cover losses that were generated as a result of that project, losses that could not be otherwise returned to Friant water users. It took me all summer.
I am still, right now, trying to get all of that water back, if you will. The thought of 400,000 acre-feet coming out of this same area and trying to meet these environmental needs is outlandish. It is crazy. It will never be found. And so if that is the tenet, from which we begin regulatory certainty, we will not get there. We cannot get there.
Mr. DOOLEY. Mr. Sprague, you have commented in your testimony about some concerns from the municipal side of things on this. I would just like you to respond to the issue.
Mr. SPRAGUE. The difficulty, or at least the way we perceive the moving forward of this Environmental Water Account, and so I am kind of going from rumor, if you will, is that the focus is so much on fish that that water quality is being lost in the calculation. We, in fact, I think it was the urban community that came forward with this original idea because we saw that here is an opportunity to predeliver water in a way that helps you to balance the water quality issues and still protect the fisheries. So at times when you have to shut off the pumps or at times where you have to move water where the water is not as good a quality, that we have the ability to still protect water quality needs.
And so that is our need. If it gets there, fine, but my concern is how this Environmental Water Account is structured. Are all of the tools designed for fisheries or are they designed to meet more than one leg of a stool in a fashion that ultimately the water in the Environmental Water Account probably does go to the environment. However, how it is managed can help resolve a variety of other issues, and that is what we have not seen. And I am very hopeful that some negotiations can happen to where we have some regulatory certainty so, in fact, that water account can be used in that fashion.
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Thank you.
Mr. DOOLEY. Thank you.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Well, at this point, we have two votes. Do you want to go, Mr. Pombo?
Mr. POMBO. No.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. OK. Mr. Pombo is recognized for his questions.
Mr. POMBO. I thank the chairman for yielding.
Mr. Hannigan, can you tell me what is the estimated shortfall of water for the State of California in the year 2020?
Mr. HANNIGAN. I should know that number, and I am going to try. But as I think I mentioned to one of you who I visited yesterday, maybe you, Mr. Pombo, that the State, every 5 years, produces a document. It is called——
Mr. POMBO. Yes, we talked about it.
Mr. HANNIGAN. —Bulletin 160. And I believe the figure is in excess of 1 million acre-feet of water, but I can't give you a specific number. It is not on my——
Mr. POMBO. Can you provide that, for the record, to the committee?
Mr. HANNIGAN. I certainly can.
Mr. POMBO. How are we going to use the CALFED process to meet California's shortfall in terms of urban, rural, agricultural and environmental needs?
Mr. HANNIGAN. I am sorry. Could you——
Mr. POMBO. How are we going to use the CALFED process to meet that shortfall?
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Mr. HANNIGAN. Well, that is part of the way to meet the shortfall. I mean, in addition to the CALFED process, the passage of Proposition 13, the carryover of the money from Proposition 204, the further investment on the part of many water agencies up and down the State, again, I will mention MWD. They just completed a storage facility that will hold 800,000 acre-feet of water. We are hopeful that we will address and meet that need over the next 15 years or so. And that includes conservation, it includes new technologies. Desalinization is one that we sort of look at with askance at the moment, but who knows, in 10 or 15 years, that process might be such that our coastal regions, which are the most populated, could be primarily served by that. And if that were the case, we would have a substantial breakthrough in water supply in this State.
Mr. POMBO. Let me ask you about something you didn't mention. Do you support on-stream storage as an option?
Mr. HANNIGAN. No. I don't see on-stream storage as a viable option in today's environment, except raising Shasta, which is being considered, by 6.5 feet, and the possibility of raising Friant and Los Vacaros. Well, Los Vacaros isn't online, but——
Mr. POMBO. We have a shortfall, and at this time you don't support new on-stream storage. A lot of the proposals that have been put forth, including a number of the ones you have mentioned, create no new water. They do give us greater flexibility. They do give us the ability to store water in areas that we currently do not store water. But in terms of capturing new water supplies, in terms of providing that million-plus acre-feet that you talk about, they do not do that. The option of doing new on-stream storage facilities is one of the only ways of creating new water.
Mr. HANNIGAN. Well, it may be one of the ways of creating new water, but if you talk in terms of on time or timely, I do not consider it to be one of the timely options to providing water, even possibly in a 20-year timeframe.
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Mr. POMBO. Why?
Mr. HANNIGAN. Finding appropriate locations, facing the difficulty in permitting such a facility and then financing. If you presume that it is going to be financed by those who benefit from the water, it may be difficult to produce that kind of a facility in that timeframe.
Mr. POMBO. So do you propose that we exclude on-stream storage from the possibilities for the future?
Mr. HANNIGAN. I don't propose that we exclude anything. I think when you are looking, you look at every possibility. But when you come to a decision making time, and you have to accept some things and reject others, it is quite possible that on-stream facilities will not make the cut.
Mr. POMBO. I know my time has expired. But it appears to me that you have made up your mind in terms of on-stream storage.
Mr. HANNIGAN. No, I haven't made up my mind. You asked me how I felt about it, and what I see and what I have to deal with, I don't see it as a viable option.
Mr. POMBO. I thank the chairman.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. We will recess, and at the conclusion of the votes resume with Mr. Miller being recognized.
[Recess.]
Mr. DOOLITTLE. The committee will reconvene. Let's assemble ourselves and quiet down as soon as possible here.
In case I didn't mention it, and I don't think I did this time, that when you sit before those mikes, which are live all of the time, you are engaging in a worldwide broadcast on the Internet.
With that, Mr. Miller is recognized for his questions.
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Mr. MILLER. Thank you, and thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing. I think it is rather timely. I would like to pick up a little bit, where we might have left off, if I might, with Mr. Hannigan, the director.
There is a lot of discussion, Tom, about what do we do when we enter another 5-year drought, and obviously that is a very important question in California. And when we look at what happened in the previous drought, obviously we learned a lot from the seventies in the droughts where there was a conscious decision that everybody was going to get, in the first year of the drought, everybody was going to get full delivery and the second year of the drought everybody got full—and all of a sudden somebody said, ''Jesus Christ, you know, Shasta Dam is pretty low here.''
And so today, when you are confronted with the prospect of a dry year, you start to think how are you going to start building carryover into this system, as I understand it. Because since then we have obviously added 15 million additional people to the States, so the concerns are heightened in terms of what happens to urban populations and the rest.
So I appreciate when people run around saying, as you said early on when it looked like maybe this was going to be potentially a dry year, we didn't know we were going to get 21 out of 29 days of rain in February, and snow and all of the rest that, you start to say, well, you better start anticipating 50 percent or what have you, and then those are adjusted. That is because we learned something from the previous regimes that ran us right into the ground, where all of a sudden we found ourselves in years four and five with essentially no flexibility in the system. If you will remember, we were stringing pipes across the San Rafael bridge so we could send water over there because their reservoirs were down because people acted in the first couple of years as if nothing was happening. And now we act in a very cautious fashion. Some would argue, I guess, too cautious.
But the point is that you can't speculate about the drought and then insist that nothing change when you find out that you have got a dry year on your hands or potentially dry years. Those are management tools, it seems to me, that have to be incorporated in these regimes as you start to figure out how would we allocate, what would we do if this has happened. Obviously, again, we sacrificed a lot of people's orchards because we treated all crops the same. And so in the fourth and fifth year all of a sudden people found out that they lost some of the permanent crops.
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And I think that that has got to be kept in perspective because I think there is a tendency to somehow suggest that we haven't learned anything, that if there is another drought, it would be treated the same, that we have the same old management tools we had then, which is not true. And yet that becomes the driving force to suggest that, therefore, you know, billions and billions of dollars may have to be spent in one fashion or another. You are at the eye of the storm of sorting this out, and I respect you for staying there.
It seems to me that, and others have mentioned it, I want to commend the Governor and the secretary for being directly involved, and yourself, and Mary Nichols and others, Gary Condit and others, who were involved in that. Because I think CALFED has sort of gone about as far as it can go without policy makers, people with authority, being directly involved. I think CALFED did a hell of a job, but I think that group has taken it about as far—now policy makers have got to start to make some decisions, and that is what makes everybody else in the room nervous.
But I think also, in the characterization of this system, is the struggle here is to bring a system that is back into balance. This, in many instances, certainly the Federal system was run as a single-purpose system. That is why we ended up passing CVPIA was to bring it back into balance. We know you can lament the Trinity water decision, except that you have a constitutional obligation there, and you effectively stole the water in the middle of the night. Good politics at the time, but now you have got to bring it back. I mean, you know, water that was headed rapidly west now runs uphill and east. But what the hell, that is what money can make water do.
And I think that people have got to appreciate that that is what the struggle is here, and what the policy makers are now, when you deal with an environmental water count, you deal with surface storage, you deal with the Delta, with groundwater management, these are all efforts to try to bring this thing back into balance that wasn't in balance for 35 or 40 years. And I just want to make sure that we don't assume that there are not legitimate claims in these meetings by people who, in the past, have not necessarily been represented.
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So now I would like to know, to the extent that you are comfortable speaking publicly, because one of the values of these meetings is, to some extent, that they are private. Obviously, one of my concerns is there are a lot of proposals on replumbing the Delta, whether it is a peripheral canal, whether it is a Hood diversion, whether it is gates and barriers and all of the rest, and I just wondered if you have any indication yet of what the time table would be there and how that plays into it because it is obviously key to a number of constituencies in the State.
Mr. HANNIGAN. Well, as somebody pointed out to me sometime in this last whirlwind year of trying to learn the water world, the Delta fundamentally is ebb and flow of tide moving east and west and water moving north and south. And they cross, and they create all kinds of challenges for us, as policymakers, or you as policy makers and us as implementers and stakeholder groups alike.
There is discussion of fixes to the Delta in trying to protect the interest in the Delta from levies to water supply, to the fish, and I guess it came to a head, if you will, last November and December, when the Delta cross channel, which as you know is a facility there now to deal with water quality and fish actions, closed. It allows fish to stay in the mainstem of the Sacramento River and move south and out or I should say move west and out.
When it is open, it provides some water quality benefits to other parts of the Delta. And when it closed in November and December, we were still pumping at Banks and at Tracy, it created a water quality, a water shortage problem in those portions of the Delta, while it was allowing questionably a number of fish to stay in the main stem.
And we finally, through operational conferring and trying to develop better decisions, we finally decided on a course of action that had it open on certain hours of a 24-hour period, allowed us to then pump, it allowed the water quality in those areas of the Delta that were threatened to improve, and it opened our eyes to the need to do something about this mechanical dysfunction of the plumbing.
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And so we are talking about Hood, and we are talking about a diversion to be studied at Hood, not to be implemented. And in the first phase, this study will commence, consistent with other fixes to the Delta, and of course it will focus on a number of things, including the level of CFS that might be appropriate if it were to be constructed. What happens to the fish if you put in a diversion at Hood? There are those who would suggest that the fish get trapped, among other things, and can't get out, and it would have a negative impact. So we are going to look at all of those factors in a Hood diversion, as well as further study how we might better operate the Delta cross-channel, and maybe better operation there would preclude Hood, but we are not making that conclusion in the Phase 1.
Mr. MILLER. Is it fair to say, and then I will stop, is it fair to say that this 4,000 CFS figure that showed up without parenthood in the interim report, you are not locked in on studying just that. You are studying a range of——
Mr. HANNIGAN. That is right. I think that is fair to say.
Mr. MILLER. —in that particular case.
Mr. HANNIGAN. Right.
Mr. MILLER. Thank you.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Mr. Radanovich is recognized.
Mr. RADANOVICH. Thank you very much and thank you, Mr. Chairman, for putting this hearing together, and I welcome all of the guests on the panel.
I do want to, and appreciate the statements of my former colleagues, I will disagree with the other gentleman from California, the other George from California, in the statement that things have been brought into balance. I think part of the reason why we are having this hearing is that although priorities for California water may have shifted more in areas of your preference, they have been brought out of balance in my areas of the State. And in what I view as in the agricultural and urban areas of the State are right now at an imbalance, and that imbalance can only be corrected by increased water storage. We will never be in a balanced situation between environment, agriculture and urban interests until there is increased water storage in the State. And I believe that that is what really has caused the problems.
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The only way to, in my view, alleviate any short-term or, excuse me, any imbalance and, therefore, some water need in agriculture and urban areas, are to, one, alleviate the regulatory constraints on a short-term basis, and No. 2 is to move forward quickly with some long-term storage.
I do have a question, if I may. And, Mr. Hannigan, it was great to meet you yesterday, and I appreciate your being in the office. I wish that you would clarify a little bit something for me on the issue of the short-term or, excuse me, the 400,000 acre-feet and the, what did you call it, the——
Mr. HANNIGAN. EWA, the Environmental Water Account.
Mr. RADANOVICH. Is that in addition to the water that is being taken currently—I believe it is about 1.1 million acre-feet—under ESA and CVPIA or would that effectively cut what is currently being taken and reducing it down to 400,000 acre-feet?
Mr. HANNIGAN. It is not the latter.
Mr. RADANOVICH. Pardon me?
Mr. HANNIGAN. It is not the latter. It is not to replace all of that which is, by regulation or by law, in the case of CVPIA, there. It is not exactly—there is the discussion of a baseline, and the baseline would include CVPIA with possibly some modifications of how that is implemented, the tools that are given under the law to Interior. It is some of the biological opinion that governs the Delta, and it is the, for the moment, the accord, that whatever is in the accord. That is part of the debate. We are trying to define the baseline. And then the 400,000 acre-feet is in addition, and I am just using that number now—I hope we are inclined to land on that, and that takes on a life of its own—but that is a number that is being discussed, and it is added to whatever the baseline finally becomes and given, with that, assurances that there will be no additional ESA or other ''takes'' of that nature.
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Mr. RADANOVICH. So from what I am understanding, unless this thing is exactly clarified, it could very well be that the 400,000 acre-feet would be a ''take'' in addition to what is already being taken now under ESA and CVPIA.
Mr. HANNIGAN. I would not describe it as a ''take.'' The concept is to acquire it.
Mr. RADANOVICH. Mr. Moss would describe it as a ''take.''
Mr. HANNIGAN. Well, we can differ, but——
Mr. RADANOVICH. Mr. Sprague would as well.
Mr. HANNIGAN. The intent is to not harm the water community any more than it has by the existing, however it is defined, base. And the 400,000 acre-feet would be acquired by money and other resources on top of that not from the water users.
Mr. RADANOVICH. Which leads me to another problem that I have with the CALFED process, and I have been one of its biggest proponents and supporters. And that is the lack of clarity or the perceived lack of clarity under what the original agreement said in the first place back in December 1994 when it was signed.
I got, I believe, and after discussions with you, knowing that not only agriculture, but urban users and the environmentalists all walked away with perhaps an unclear idea as to how they, what they signed and how this was going to work out. And after 5 years, it has led to a great deal of disappointment on all sides because everybody thought it was something that it never turned out. And essentially everybody signed on to an agreement that wasn't specific enough. And so at this point, everybody is sorely disappointed in this entire process, which leads me to the concerns of my constituents, which I take to be both urban and agriculture users. And that is that we are at a point now where we are still reviewing this process. We have signed an agreement that was not specific, and so therefore the regulatory agencies have been administering CVPIA and ESA in contrary ways to what the urban and ag users thought would be, and now we are looking to go forward, still trusting that what we are all agreeing to today is going to be administered as fairly as it was these last 5 years or unfairly, as many, many people believed.
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So I guess in my view, CALFED gets a big fat ''F'' in that. And that the agreement was not, everybody came together to work together, the stakeholders, to solve the State's water problem. It was very admirable. They signed a blurry agreement that got screwed up along the way. And my thought is that any future move with CALFED or any future direction in solving the State's water problem should not be conducted in the same way. In fact, we might want to go back and fix what created the problem in the first place, and that is nobody had a clear idea of what their expectations were on the short term, while we were solving all of these long-term problems.
And so I guess this leads me to my next question because I, in my right mind, would never advise urban or agriculture people to pass on any or have any expectation of any future discussions of CALFED and State Water unless they know exactly what they are getting, and it is in law. Would you support then, assuming that the stakeholders could get together again, get something specific that they can all agree on, would you support bringing that bill to Congress and getting it in the law so that we have the backing of the law, which has been another problem, as you know, of CALFED. Its standing in the law has always been kind of questioned. Would you support codifying any agreement like that and making it into law, so that we all know what our expectations are and we all know that we can operate, at least on the short term, with a certain degree of reliability?
Mr. HANNIGAN. The whole discussion about the—first of all, I agree with what you have said.
Mr. RADANOVICH. Yes, and I realize——
Mr. HANNIGAN. It has been my own experience, when last April we had to drop pumping at Banks from April 15th to May 15th, you know, the staff, the people, the technical people advised me this is what we have to do, and we did it. Then, after May 15th, when we were presumably to ramp back up, we continued to stay at the low levels, and people are saying to me, you know, we have got these smelt around the pumps. We can't go back up because the count has gotten to a threshold where a red light goes on and all hell breaks loose. And so we stayed with the low pumping. I started getting phone calls from the project contractors, and they are saying, ''You know, I hope we are covering the lost water as a result of this continued pumping,'' which is what happens under the accord.
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So I tell people, ''Give me a copy of the accord.'' Now, I am not an attorney, but I get it, I read it, and I find there is nothing that enforceable in the accord.
Mr. RADANOVICH. Tom, I don't have a lot of time. I was just wondering if I could get your idea on whether you support a law——
Mr. HANNIGAN. Well, if, in fact, we get an agreement as a result of this CALFED process that does what we are all happy with, I see no reason why it can't be codified.
Mr. RADANOVICH. OK. I appreciate that.
Do I have more time? Can I run on or shall I wait?
Mr. DOOLITTLE. You have run on 4.5 minutes beyond the time.
Mr. HANNIGAN. I apologize for——
Mr. DOOLITTLE. We will come back. We will give you a second shot at it.
Mr. Herger is recognized.
Mr. MILLER. Mr. Chairman?
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Yes, Mr. Miller?
[Mr. Doolittle and Mr. Miller conferred.]
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Well, I suppose that would be appropriate. In that event, it is back to me.
Mr. Hannigan, I feel very strongly, It is so interesting to me, when CALFED was conceived, they took on-stream storage out of the equation to begin with, and that made it immediately suspect in my mind. And now to hear you say that you do not think that is viable, and then you cited, what do we call this thing down there that used to be Domenigoni [ph.], is it Diamond Reservoir? Is that what they call it now?
Mr. HANNIGAN. Right.
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Mr. DOOLITTLE. Where they bought a valley and put dams at both ends, a need I believe when the dust has settled, that is going to cost right around $3 billion or so——
Mr. HANNIGAN. That is right.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. —for the capacity to store 800,000 acre-feet of existing water, not new water, simply moving it around so that it is there.
Now the State is talking about coming up with 400,000 acre-feet. I am just wondering, I mean, that is a lot of acre-feet. Where are you going to put all of that?
Mr. HANNIGAN. Let me just respond first to the Diamond whatever they called it. It was East Side—well, it is Diamond something now. Diamond Valley. Diamond Valley. Thank you.
That water is water that is otherwise not used by MWD in any given year. It is a combination of Colorado and State Water Project so it creates a yield, and it is like new water. It is water that otherwise would not be used in the system. And I wanted to clarify that from the earlier discussion with Congressman Pombo. It is not a zero sum game. That is water that in the case of the Colorado would flow on down and probably flow into Mexico.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. But things are so bad and so unstable in this State that the Met decided they would impose on their ratepayers a $3 billion charge to gain the certainty of having the water there if they needed it. That is a pretty sad commentary on the state of affairs.
Mr. HANNIGAN. Well, I agree with you. I think that is a debate that ought to occur amongst the constituencies of MWD. They had a project. I don't know what its original estimate was, but it ran over that, and it's now where it is.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. I think it was supposed to be around a billion, so, you know, just a couple of extra.
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Mr. HANNIGAN. Well, as somebody said, it is only money.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. But I make this point: I mean, they did all of that to store water they already had a right to. It is not like building a dam and creating new water in that sense. And I just find amazing, and frankly I think a majority of this committee strongly supports adding on-stream storage, and there is the most obvious side of all at Auburn, and you people act like that is talking about building some 22nd Century transportation system or something.
Mr. HANNIGAN. No, but——
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Something that is so costly and out of the realm of reality that that is just a pipedream. Why do you have that feeling?
Mr. HANNIGAN. I don't have that feeling. But I would argue that is the best case for why on-stream new constructed storage is not a viable alternative. How long has it been since Congress authorized Auburn?
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Well, let me just ask you this.
Mr. HANNIGAN. I don't know. When was it—in the late seventies?
Mr. DOOLITTLE. It was 1965.
Mr. HANNIGAN. 1965.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Even George wasn't here when that happened.
[Laughter.]
Mr. HANNIGAN. He came right after. But any rate, no, Mr. Chairman, that is my point. It is not whether or not whether or not for me, whether or not it is a viable project. As I look into the year 2000 at how to deal with California's water problems, that doesn't look like a viable alternative.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Well, may I just suggest to you a couple of points of why I think you ought to at least reassess it.
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Mr. HANNIGAN. OK.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Yes, our friends who proclaim themselves environmentalists definitely are opposed to the dam, even though it adds new sources of water and does a great deal for water quality and water quantity. But you have the entire foundation of the dam there for approximately a billion dollars. You would get not 800,000 acre-feet of storage, but 2.3 million acre-feet of storage. Most of the land has already been acquired and sits there.
The permits you were talking about have been acquired. I am sure they will be fought over again in court. But the point is a lot has been done. The city of Sacramento gets the flood protection it needs to stop the flood that the experts predict will occur. That qualifies it for Federal flood control money. I mean, there is a whole bunch of advantages to this site, plus it makes the water available for Mr. Bamert, well, indirectly. He wouldn't directly get it from there, but I mean it adds to the supply. It certainly helps El Dorado and Placer Counties, the local people, Sacramento County, and first and foremost San Joaquin County, which is the greatest probably single beneficiary of building an Auburn Dam in terms of water supply.
So when you look at the figure, I mean, Met spent $3 billion to get 800,000 acre-feet of moving its water around, you could spend about a billion and get 2.3 million acre-feet, plus protect all of the money the State has at risk in the flood plain down in Sacramento. Will you assess these criteria and perhaps reevaluate?
Mr. HANNIGAN. We will review, reassess and perhaps reevaluate. But, you know, the truth of the matter is I don't think that is where California is going. They are not going to the Auburn Dam.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Well, California will go where we tell it to go, won't it, as the policymakers?
Mr. HANNIGAN. Well, I don't know. I don't have any control over who goes into court and files a suit——
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Mr. DOOLITTLE. No, but we can fight those suits.
Mr. HANNIGAN. I don't have any control over a court who rules in favor of those who file. I mean——
Mr. DOOLITTLE. I mean, anything we do that is a new project is probably going to be subject to a suit. I mean, so Auburn is not unique in that sense.
Mr. HANNIGAN. Well, we are trying to find projects that are viable, that are timely and that provide a solution. If Auburn does that, we will certainly consider it.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Well, Auburn does that. A majority of this subcommittee supports that. So I would urge you to consider and will constantly be looking to encourage that as a solution because it is the most obvious solution. Why would you spend so much more money someplace else to get less? And that is not going to be easy, as you well know. You are still going to have your lawsuits coming up there, and you probably need to do everything that has been mentioned and Auburn and will be lucky to stay ahead of it.
All right. Mr. Miller gets his second round.
Mr. MILLER. Mr. Dooley.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Oh, Mr. Dooley. All right. OK.
Mr. DOOLEY. No, thank you.
Mr. MILLER. Thank you.
Mr. Moss, in your testimony in the beginning you talked quite a bit about certainty, and I would like to return to a point here; that it is very hard, I mean, obviously we are in a transitional period here, where we had a water system that was conceived and run by rules according to 1950, and we have a much different State today in the year 2000 than our anticipated growth to the year 2030/2020. And so as I said, we are trying to bring this system into some equilibrium, and yes, equilibrium means that water will flow out of some areas into other areas and those changes will be made. But it is hard for me to see how you bring the system into equilibrium until you measure out what all the requirements are to do that.
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And obviously ESA is a huge part of that component, a huge part of that component. I mean, CALFED exists because we are trying to put off ESA coming down full force and effect. The Environmental Water Account is something people are thinking about trying to put off so they can get the full 404 protections and all of the rest of that. Trinity River, you can keep putting off the decision, but everybody knows that that water, some amount of water is going to be put back into that river as a matter of treaty, a matter of rights there.
Colorado River is changing. The questions of what happens with groundwater, what management yields can be done, the things we see going on in terms of water reuse and management down in Orange County and in L.A. So I don't know quite how you get that certainty. If people want to continue to pretend, as if somehow if we could just get these players out of the room, we could solve this problem. Because those players aren't going to leave the room. As Mr. Hannigan pointed out, they will just end up in the courtroom because they have very strong standing in the law. So I don't get where people think by throwing out CALFED or something that this is going to lead to some level of certainty.
Mr. MOSS. Well, the water users always will move in the direction of certainty. And that is kind of an axiom that I think you will find very consistent. So if they find more certainty in the courts, they will move in that direction. If they find more certainty in working through CALFED, they will move in that direction.
Let me more directly answer your question in terms of, in terms of this regulatory baseline and the concepts therein. When the Accord was signed, people thought they had attained a certain level of stability. The biological opinions as a result of the Accord said that they were nonjeopardy, that we had attained a level of stability with the Endangered Species. While it didn't say it was in a recovery path, it was a level of stability that would keep them from going extinct.
And I think what we are talking about now is moving into the realm of recovery of these endangered species. And so we start with a level of stability for the species. And now the question is will the Federal Government exercise its discretion that exists within the law to have recovery at this angle, that quickly, or will it be at this angle, that quickly? There is a lot of discretion in how quickly the species will recover. And I think what we are asking for, as water users, is to take a reasonable level of—use that discretion to get a reasonable level of recovery when balanced against the obvious impacts that are occurring to water users, both in terms of water quality and water supply.
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So we think there is a tremendous amount of discretion within the way the laws are being applied. And that is the balance that we are seeking at this point. Let me also clarify my previous remarks.
Mr. MILLER. Let me just point out, you know, that is an interesting argument because the suggestion is there is only water in building dams. You suggested there is water in discretion.
Mr. MOSS. Absolutely.
Mr. MILLER. One is a hell of a lot cheaper than the other.
Mr. MOSS. Absolutely. I mean, if you can manipulate, for example, the export/import ratio in terms of how much can be pumped out of the Delta at various times, you can generate huge amounts of water.
Mr. MILLER. Again, going back to your argument——
Mr. MOSS. Again, that is a discretionary point that is under the control of primarily the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Mr. MILLER. Back to your argument about certainty, I mean, it seems to me that some people want to condemn, and I guess they are condemning the process by which a group of policymakers are trying to arrive at that. And some people may get some bad news and other people may get good news, and some people get no news. But you have these competing claims that are now well-recognized, that were never recognized. We didn't even know about them, in some cases, when we designed these systems. And I think that is the struggle that is going on here.
Mr. MOSS. Absolutely.
Mr. MILLER. And I think what I hear Director Hannigan saying is we are looking at a range of tools here to see how we can better manage this very complex system. And to the extent that we can, diminish what may view as losers when it is all put together. And yet we see people come in and blasting because we have to, in that consideration, we have to meet treaty obligations, we have to meet ESA, we have to meet Delta protections, we have to do all of these other things. I appreciate people don't like that. And discretion will play a role in that. There are determinations that the secretary can make about various aspects of that.
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Mr. MOSS. Absolutely.
Mr. MILLER. But somehow blowing up this process, as Mr. Bamert suggests, Bamert suggested that we would all be better off with this. I would like to know how. He may think he's—he is better off, but in terms of a State of 30 million people, does anybody really believe that this would be a step forward, just to walk away from CALFED or the follow-on policy considerations that are now being made by the Governor and the Secretary of the Interior? Where would you then get them reengaged in this process? Start out in the courts?
Mr. MOSS. As I stated in my remarks, CALFED has to be a success. We have no choice. Again we have watched with great angst, as you noted, the deliberations between the State and the Federal Government, and quite frankly view this process here today as an opportunity to provide the negotiators with some standards that we think need to be the outcome of CALFED.
Let me clarify my remarks relative to the Environmental Water Account. The Environmental Water Account is a good idea. We support it. We think there is a lot of merit there. I guess what I am real concerned about at this point, and I heard Mr. Hannigan say it again a short while ago, that without having a threshold of 400,000 acre-feet in this Environmental Water Account that we are not going to get any kind of regulatory certainty. We have to have a threshold of an additional 400,000 acre-feet in this account, otherwise we are not going to get certainty. And that, because of the volume, because of the size, is not realistic. So if that is the threshold, then the environmental water account will fail, and then we are back to pure regulatory regime which, for the water users in the CVP, is one of additional shortages.
We support the idea of an Environmental Water Account. We think it's a great idea and look forward to helping——
Mr. MOSS. I would just respond I appreciate that. And it may be that if people really want the full regulatory relief that they think they can envision with an environmental water account, there clearly, just, you know, when you match it against the wall, it is going to have to be very real. It can't be a phony account. It can't be paper water, it can't be this, it can't be that. That is why Mr. Hannigan is going to go out and others are going to
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go out and scour the State to see whether or not it can be assembled. And that is not necessarily good news for everybody in the State. But the fact of the matter is that is what they have to create, a real account. Whether it can rise to 400,000, whether that is sufficient or insufficient or what have you will obviously clearly be tested. But the hope is that that removes both of these systems from the kind of piecemeal, regulatory impact lawsuits that you can get into that so far we have been able to avoid because we have had agreement about moving this process forward. And now the process is stalled out at one level and now the Governor and others are trying to move it forward. It is a high-risk thing for them to do. I admire that they are doing it. But it is very high risk. But if they didn't do that, we would be stalled here, and we would get a record of decision that nobody supports, and then we would be back in all of our old problems, and at some point, somebody is going to go ask EPA to do their job.
Mr. MILLER. I would suggest to you the place to find the water is going to be in new storage, and that is the conclusion that I have come to and my constituents have.
Mr. MILLER. But understand, if I just might, Mr. Secretary, I mean, Mr. Chairman——
[Laughter.]
Mr. MILLER. George Bush wouldn't make you secretary, would he?
[Laughter.]
Mr. MILLER. Rumor, rumor, rumor.
[Laughter.]
Mr. MILLER. We just had a discussion here about what Metropolitan Water District did. They now are spending what looks like $3 billion because somebody there made a decision. And at one point people agreed, and I don't know if everybody agrees now, but this was a way that they could provide some operational flexibility to their system.
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Contra Costa Water District did the same thing to provide operational flexibility, not in terms of yield, but just in terms of water quality. Now we are talking about surface storage, and you talk about surface storage for multiple reasons: A community believes they are going to get yield out of that. Most economists and others that look at that say nobody could buy that water if you were going to get yield. Some people say, well, this storage is really about the environmental account because it gives us flexibility in moving water through the Delta and elsewhere, that there are some components of that.
So when we talk about surface storage, there is something in the eye of the beholder here, depending where they reside in the State, and some of it may be affordable and some of it isn't again affordable. I mean, we have an agriculture community that very soon or currently is engaged in negotiations and is going to have to figure out how they amortize the remaining cost of the CVP between now and 2030. That is a lot of money. That is a lot of price and water. And now you want to take on the additional burden of storage?
Well, what I have heard from the agriculture community is that they are not going to pay for that. Well, we started out operating here the beneficiary pays. Now, I appreciate we can make more and more look like flood control and more and more look like environmental water, but at some point if somebody has expectations of yield, they have got to belly up to the bar and pay the money. And that turns out to be real expensive water.
Mr. MOSS. I think a lot of this goes back to the definition of baseline, and that is one of the reasons why it makes it so important as to know where it is we are building from. Because you are absolutely right.
Mr. MILLER. Where you are building from is you want relief from the regulatory operations. And so the baseline is interesting and the running out the 1994 Accord is interesting, it is just not relevant very much to what the burdens of the system are.
Mr. MOSS. Well, it is relative to who shares the cost. Because if we are getting back the water to the CVP that was leant for environmental restoration and stabilization of endangered species, then that cost of developing that water should be a broad spread cost that goes to the community——
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Mr. MILLER. Well, then the cheapest way to do that would be in contract negotiations, just act like a banker and say, ''Here's the new terms and conditions.'' Because that water belongs to the Federal taxpayer, and before we ask them to put up a couple of billion dollars, many billions of dollars, maybe we ought to just renegotiate the contracts and they can put the water that way.
Mr. MOSS. Well, we are in the middle of that right now. And certainly water costs are something that we are all very cognizant of as part of those negotiations and are on track to meet the demands of Congress of having the CVP fully repaid by the year 2030. I mean, that is something that everyone has accepted.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Mr. Pombo is recognized.
Mr. POMBO. Mr. Hannigan, I think it is important that I clarify—and I intended on going into a different line of questioning, but I think it is important that I clarify what my concerns are in terms of offstream, onstream groundwater storage. Every project that has come along in the time that I have been here, there has been opposition to it, regardless of what it was. I had a very small groundwater recharge project in my district that the environmental community opposed, and one of my state senators opposed doing that, and it had severe environmental concerns because of the saltwater intrusion into my district.
It does not matter what we propose, there is going to be opposition to it. And as we have gone through all the billions and billions of dollars that we have talked about and spent, there is always this promise that we are going to do this stuff now, but we are going to take care of storage in the future. We are not ruling out storage, offstream, onstream, groundwater recharge, we are not ruling it out, but we are going to do it in the future. But every time we bring up a storage project, there is opposition to it. ''Well, you can't do it. You can't do it now. It is too tough. You can't do it now.'' But when you talk to a lot of people—and I am not going to put you in this basket, but a lot of people say, ''Well, we just need to do more conservation.'' We have got our farmers operating on about half the amount of water they had before. How much more conservation are you going to get out of them?
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We have got, at least in the northern part of the state, every time there is a reduction in water, our city has gone to water rationing. I had the good fortune of sitting on a city counsel when we had to tell people that they can only use half as much water, and at the same time that other parts of the state didn't know what water rationing was.
But if we are going to solve this problem, storage is going to have to be part of it, and at some point somebody is going to have to stand up and say, ''Yeah, we are going to have to do storage.'' And it just seems like every time it is brought up, there is a reason why we can't do it, and that is a big concern to me.
But the question I wanted to ask you had to do with accountability of spending money. I think that Congress is abdicating its responsibility in oversight of how US taxpayer money is being funded when it comes to CALFED, because we have no control, no say-so over how that money is being spent, and we are putting up tens of millions of dollars a year into the CALFED process, and as of yet, I have been unable to receive any kind of a list of projects that say this is what—we want money, and this is what we are going to spend it on. When I ask for a list of projects that this money is going to be spent on, I get a list from 2 years ago, ''This is what we spent the money on'', and I get a list of potential projects. And when I ask, ''Will the projects that we are going to spend money on come from this list?'' And the answer is, ''No, not necessarily. It may come from another list, but these are the ones that we have got right now.''
And my question for you is would you with the Governor support a reauthorization proposal that actually puts it back on the policymakers in terms of these are the lists of projects that we are requesting and this is the amount of Federal money we want to fund those projects?
Mr. HANNIGAN. Yes.
Mr. POMBO. Because I believe that if CALFED is reauthorized, at least in my mind, it would have to have that component within it.
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Mr. HANNIGAN. I outlined in my initial statement that Secretary Nichols presented a proposal with the extension of the CALFED authorization that would include a process that gave Congress, the legislature, who would have and does have the same interest, a method, an ability to measure the accountability of those resources. Let me——
Mr. POMBO. Let me stop you there. It is my understanding that the proposal that was put forth was a quarterly report on it.
Mr. HANNIGAN. Correct.
Mr. POMBO. And that is better than what we are getting. I will grant you that is better than what we are getting, but I can't think of any other projects where a state comes to Congress and says, ''Give us this money, and trust us, we will spend it right.'' And there has to be a list of projects when you are asking for the appropriation.
Mr. HANNIGAN. I don't see any problem with Congress having as much review, accountability type review of what CALFED does. That's up to you to decide in the course of your work here on the subcommittee.
Let me just touch base on the storage, because when we had this conversation earlier, I failed to mention the number of short-term—we consider short-term to be the 5, 7 years, the first phase of CALFED's record of decision, and we're discussing storage possibilities, storage projects that would come online in the short-term, things like Los Vacaros, things like groundwater storage in a variety of locations, things like—I don't know if Shasta would come online in 5 to 7 years, but raising the Shasta 6 and a half feet, or Friant, and those are not going to be without opposition, they're not going to be without the possibility of lawsuits. It's not like we're measuring those projects on whether or not there's going to be opposition. I don't want to leave you with that impression. We recognize that everybody is not going to be happy. In fact, my personal opinion is, is that the first 4 to 5 years of CALFED's existence has depended on everybody being too happy to really get any hard decisions.
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Mr. POMBO. As you are well aware, there is no project that is not going to be with opposition, and none of the ones that you have mentioned so far is opposition free, but I think that the chairman's point in regards to Auburn Dam, was if you are looking at cost and return, it is his opinion and my opinion that for the cost, we get a greater return from Auburn than all of these other projects that we are talking about doing, and that is why it doesn't make sense to put all of these others in front of what may be a better return on the cost. And because there is opposition, organized opposition to Auburn, it does not mean that we shouldn't do it, because there are—every one of these projects there is opposition to and there will be lawsuits to, and just as there was with Los Vacaros.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Thank you. Mr. Radanovich is recognized.
Mr. RADANOVICH. Thank you. Before I get into my comments, the only thing that I would say is that I agree with the two previous speakers, that in all the best, I think, most efficient water solutions to California's water problems like, I believe to be Auburn Dam and also the Peripheral Canal—I know that is words that we shouldn't mention—are both cost effective and are really the best solutions to California's water problems. But the problem is that they are not politically expedient, and that is what—maybe we need some leadership in facing up to these realities.
But I guess my main comments that I wanted to make were though that I believe—and I think a lot of people would—was that the new shift, the relatively new shift in priorities for California water away from urban and ag. and beginning to include environmental uses, I believe, and again, most people believe, should never have been into effect or taken their form in the CVPIA and increased regulatory aspects of the ESA until there was increased water storage online. And I think because that did not happen at the same time, it has caused us a lot of short-term problems and has created this issue and this need for regulatory relief.
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What somewhat concerns me about this process, where it is right now, is that I think, or I would caution the decisionmakers not to do this, to try to think that the promise of specifically identifying increased storage sites is going to alleviate the problem of short-term relief, because that is an issue that needs to be dealt with separately, and I think I can speak for urban and ag. users by saying that the promise of quickly arriving at new storage sites is not going to solve the problem. And so I hope that those that are making these decisions are not intending that to be—the solution for that problem without specifically addressing the urgent need for short-term relief. I think it should be widely accepted that those administrators that are administrating the current law, can't be trusted with this wide discretion of legal implementation of this thing. And so I guess it goes back to my—the main statement that I believe, and that is that this project would not—will not and should not go forward until there is specific agreement on what we can expect from now for the next 5 to 7 years when Shasta is raised or Friant's raised or something else, unless it is specific, it is in law, and everybody has an expectation as to what it would be.
And I don't really need a response. I just wanted to make sure that you all knew where I was coming from. And I used less time.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Thank you.
Mr. RADANOVICH. You are welcome.
[Laughter.]
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Do you reserve or yield back the balance of your time?
Mr. RADANOVICH. I will yield it to the chair.
Mr. DOOLITTLE. Thank you. I will keep it in reserve.
Mr. Herger is recognized.
Mr. HERGER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I would like to begin with requesting consent of the committee to have a statement put into the record.
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Mr. DOOLITTLE. Yes, that has already been approved, so your full statement will be included.
STATEMENT OF HON. WALLY HERGER, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA
Mr. HERGER. Thank you very much, and I thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members for allowing me to sit on the panel today. And it is good to see you again, Mr. Hannigan from our former life back in the State Assembly some years back. Thank you very much for working with us on this issue, which is so incredibly important, and I say that. So often as I hear what seems to be taking place with CALFED, it seems like—which we need to be doing, spending a tremendous amount of time on the environment, which we have to do. But my concern is we seem to be overlooking the fact that we have live people, families, men, women and children that are involved in this as well, in this process, and I am speaking as an individual who was born and raised in Northern California in a ranching background, grew up where my father grew up and where my grandfather lived.
And my memories of growing up, No. 1, when I was 5-years-old, of having our area flooded, our home flooded. Five years later, 1955, I have seen all of Yuba City, the town of Yuba City flooded; 37 people drowned. All the area from Yuba City all the way to Sacramento basically, Feather River at that time, all flooded, just flooded just below where I lived at that time. Again, just a couple of years ago in 1997, a levy break again there. Three people drowned, lost their lives again here.
And we seen to have feasts or famines in our area as far as water is concerned. It is either too much or not enough. I also recall on our ranch, going through the drought times, the times before our onstream storages, thank goodness, that we were able to put in, when we would sink our wells down every year. It is, you know, which farmer would have his well the deepest? Because the ones who didn't would be the ones that would run out of water. We have, for the most part, water until we get into the 4 and 5-year droughts which we have seen also here just in the last decade, so it is incredibly crucial, life-taking type of issues that we are talking about in addition to the economy that we are talking about.
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And as undoubtedly you sense here, is that there is a tremendous amount of frustration from those of us who live in this area. We had high hopes to begin with. CALFED was something we were going to come together and work something out to say—we put men on the moon; we can surely take care of these problems, but yet again, it seems that the extremists within the environmental movement seem to have one way of doing things, and that is, just take our water, those of us in the north, remove it from the farmers, and, you know, it doesn't matter if three people drown or so on—I hate to put it that way, but I don't know any other way how you can look at it than that way, from those of us who live there.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Herger follows:]
STATEMENT OF HON. WALLY HERGER FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA
In November of 1998 the California Department of Water Resources issued a Water Plan Update known as Bulletin 160–98. I would like to begin my comments by citing a passage from the executive summary of this document.
''Bulletin 160–98 estimates that California's water shortages at a 1995 level of development are 1.6 million acre feet in average water years, and 5.1 million acre feet in drought years . . . Bulletin 16098 forecasts increased shortages by 2020—2.4 million acre feet in an average water year and 6.2 million acre feet in drought years.'' (Executive Summary, California Water Plan Update, Bulletin 160–98 at ES 1–2.)
California's increasing population is the driving force behind these increasing water demands. Projections indicate that an additional 15 million people will move to California by the year 2020—equivalent to the populations of 8 western states: Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah.
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These figures are cause for grave concern. While CALFED is primarily tasked with addressing the critical needs of the Bay-Delta, it is clear that when it comes to water, everything is connected to everything else. We cannot address the very real and critical environmental needs of the Bay-Delta without taking a comprehensive approach.
CALFED representatives have often stated that there is no single ''magic bullet solution'' to California's water woes. I agree with this assessment. The problems are complex, and the solutions will be varied and complex. However, CALFED also maintains that it is ''Premature'' to make any hard and firm plans for storage. I profoundly disagree. Given the scope of the projected water shortages, it is glaringly obvious that we must put more water into the system if we are going to have any hope of avoiding chronic and potentially debilitating water shortages. Issues of ''process'' should not be used to paper over the extremely obvious reality that California needs additional water now, and that this water deficit will only be exacerbated as the state gains a projected 15 million new residents by 2020.
Bulletin 160–98 notes that ''water management options identified as likely to be implemented could reduce those shortages to 200,000 acre feet in average water years and 2.7 million acre feet in drought years.'' (Executive Summary at ES 1–2.)
But the questions remain, how and when, exactly?
DWR states that ''new storage facilities are an important part of the mix of options needed to meet California's future needs.''
(Executive Summary at ES5–13.) But where will this storage come from if CALFED is going to wait until the effect of stage I actions is determined? In fact, Bulletin 160–98 states, ''Given the long lead time required for implementing large storage projects, no CALFED facilities may be in service within the Bulletin's 2020 planning horizon.'' (Executive Summary at ES5–9.)
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This storage will not materialize out of thin air. Are we to presume that private parties or local agencies are going to somehow create this body of stored water? How can this phantom storage be counted as ''likely'' for planning purposes? This is akin to a college student presuming it is ''likely'' that he will win the lottery to finance his education. Misplaced optimism is no virtue.
While CALFED representatives have consistently stated that increased storage must be part of the equation, I have seen no meaningful evidence that storage is being vigorously and actively pursued as a pressing and urgent goal. Indeed, Bulletin 160–98 leads me to believe that, rather than the ''likely'' development of storage, CALFED's current direction virtually guarantees that storage is highly unlikely for another two decades.
I am frankly exasperated by this continuous foot-dragging, dithering, and paralysis. As a native of Northern California, I know the question is not a matter of if we are going to have another drought, but when.
While I support prudent water conservation, we must face the fact that we are quickly reaching the practical limits of water conservation strategies, many of which have been in effect for decades. Looking to conservation as the solution to each of our legitimate water needs—as is often the mantra of the extreme environmental community—is shortsighted and irresponsible. And we cannot just ''take the water from agriculture.'' Unfortunately, there is no way to grow food wit