Congressional Mischief
National Capital by Ron Stork
There’s the traditional bad stuff here.
Bills
The southern San Joaquin Valley Republicans (from, north to south, Representatives Duarte to McCarthy, plus McClintock) held a Congressional field hearing to examine why storage dam authorizations, permitting, and construction just weren’t happening enough. A markup followed when the Congressmen got back to Washington DC.
The primary purpose of the bills (HR 215 and HR 872) is to pre-empt the California Wild & Scenic Rivers Act’s protection of the McCloud River upstream of Shasta Reservoir, decrease environmental restrictions on pumping from the Delta, end the 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement Act restoration fund “tax” on CVP water used to mitigate the adverse effects of the CVP, and extend the now-expired 2016 Water Improvements for Nation Act meant to revive the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s dam construction program and provide subsidies to non-Reclamation dams.
HR 872 consolidates federal ESA approvals for anadromous fish into the US Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS), an authority which USFWS currently shares with the National Marine Fisheries Service. USFWS has long operated under the thumb of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, a sister agency in the Department of the Interior. Thus, this consolidation would likely weaken implementation of the Endangered Species Act.
You can see the administration’s letter from the field hearing and other various letters at this link.
From left to right: Speaker McCarthy, Congressmen McClintock, Valadao, and Duarte. Public domain.
Rhetoric
The southern San Joaquin Valley Congressmen are certainly consistent. They want more water from the Sacramento River, and they want more dams wherever it could advantage the large agribusiness corporations in their districts. And they want California and U.S. taxpayers to pay for them.
It’s been their business model for years, indeed more than a century. The signs on I-5 are just the last couple of decades of advocacy. Check out this rambling article from the San Joaquin Valley Sun quoting Valley leaders. (The San Joaquin Valley Blueprint is a multibillion-dollar series of new canals and canal expansions to increase Delta diversions by 50% to serve the east side of the southern San Joaquin Valley, Kern County, and whoever else is needed to provide the political umph to gather in the taxpayer subsidies.)
These are the voices of the political establishment of the Valley:
Louder voices, bigger investments needed for Calif. water security, local experts say
And a nice counter from testifying Taxpayers for Common Sense:
