SANTA NELLA — Six Republicans held an oversight field hearing Friday in the district of Rep. John Duarte (R-Modesto), hoping to find out why water is in short supply in parts of the Central Valley despite above-average reservoir storage this year.
Members of the U.S. House Natural Resources subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries met in the Ponce de Leon Room at Hotel Mission de Oro, in front of about 100 spectators.
The committee was comprised of Duarte, Reps. Tom McClintock (R-El Dorado Hills), Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale), David Valadao (R-Hanford), Vince Fong (R-Bakersfield), and committee chair Cliff Bentz (R-Oregon). Valadao and Fong are not members of the regular House subcommittee, but were given permission to attend the discussion since their districts are part of the valley.
“The implications of this hearing go far beyond the Central Valley,” said Duarte. “We see the crux of it right here. We see the parched fields.”
McClintock pressed witnesses for answers as to why new water storage facilities aren’t being sought in the state.
“Shasta (dam) was built to 600 feet of elevation and it’s designed to be 800 feet,” said McClintock. “Those missing 200 feet … would mean another 9 million acre-feet of water storage on the Sacramento system. Everybody thinks the Colorado is the great river in the United States. It’s a pigmy compared to the Sacramento. Sacramento’s flow is almost twice as much. The difference is we store 60 million acre-feet on the Colorado and we store about 11 million feet on the Sacramento and we lose all the rest of that to ocean every year.”
Josh Weimer, TID’s director of external affairs, agreed with McClintock’s assertion.
“We definitely need the will to build more storage and to capture the water when it’s available,” said Weimer.
However, according to Ron Stork, senior policy staff for environmental agency Friends of the River, raising the level of the Shasta Dam would be in violation of a Wild and Scenic Rivers Act amendment that was signed into law by Republican Gov. George Deukmejian in 1989.
“Mr. McClintock’s vision has some flaws,” said Stork.
Three members of President Biden’s administration were invited to testify before the panel, but declined to attend, according to Duarte. No Democratic members of the subcommittee were in attendance.
«This was a one-sided affair, and the Democrats probably recognized that it wasn’t going to go anywhere,” said Stork. «We have two Democratic senators in California who probably care more about the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and ensuring water quality, than either Mr. McClintock or Mr. Duarte.”
Duarte talked at length about the Folsom South Canal Extension project, which would divert water from the American River at the Nimbus Dam in Sacramento County.
Again, that would be in conflict with the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, which was signed into California state law in 1972.
“So, the lower American River is protected by an act signed into law by then-Gov. Ronald Regan, who is wildly considered the guiding light of the Republican Party.”
