Water rider in Republican budget is harmful to California

This Continuing Resolution obviously goes far too in the extreme direction of harming our economy and harming many of the services that our citizens who come to rely on to finish and bring their lives together whether they are working, whether they need health care, whether their children need education. And this resolution is harmful to that.

But I want to speak for the moment on Section 1475, which is the rider that is added to this legislation that will harm the California economy, harm our ability to plan into the future for the use of water.

We have a water system in California that's dramatically oversubscribed. And we are in the process now of bringing that together to make sure that we can meet the future economic the needs of our state and also the various sectors of that economy, whether they be the fishing sector, the energy-producing sector, the farming sector, or settlement of our cities.

But with this rider, this rider throws out 18 years of litigation that successfully brought to the end of long conflict on the San Joaquin River to provide for that settlement, a settlement that is agreed to by almost everyone.

More importantly for the sake of the long-term water use, this amendment defunds the biological opinions that are going forward that are the cornerstone to provide for the final elements of the plan to provide California and the apportionment of that water for the protection of the fisheries and the economies in northern California, for the protection of the water supplies of the Central Valley's economy and the needs of great urban areas of southern California.

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