**Testimony of John Rossi**

**General Manager, Western Municipal Water District**

**Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water and Power**

**February 28, 2006**

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for inviting me to
testify today in support of S. 1474, the "Riverside-Corona Feeder Water
Supply Act." I am John Rossi, General Manager of Western Municipal Water
District, project sponsor of the Riverside-Corona Feeder.

Western Municipal Water District (District) is a regional wholesale
water agency and a member of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California. We provide wholesale and retail water and wastewater
services to a 527 square mile service area with a population of over
800,000 people. Our region is expected to double in population, with a
similar doubling of demand for imported water by 2025. Our region is
also one of the fastest expanding economies in the nation.

S. 1474 authorizes the planning, design, and construction of the Feeder
with a 25% Federal cost share. S. 1474 contemplates that the Bureau of
Reclamation (Reclamation) will be the lead Federal agency partnering on
the project.

The Riverside-Corona Feeder (Feeder) will provide one of California\'s
fastest growing, but drought prone regions, with up to 40,000 acre-feet
a year of new drinking water by capturing and storing water in wet years
in order to increase firm water supplies and improve water quality. The
project will include approximately 20 wells and 28 miles of pipeline to
convey the water throughout the region to numerous cities and water
districts.

Let me put this project into perspective \-- if it was in place in 2005,
one of the wettest years on record in California, we could have stored
about 35,000 AF of water. Instead, that water was lost to the ocean, and
was not available to serve the region in the drought years that have
followed.

As we prepare for the future impacts of global climate change on our
limited water supplies, this project will become even more important.
Models for our region produced by the University of California predict
that climate change will produce less-frequent, but more intense rain
storm events. Additionally, these projections detail significantly
faster snow melt. This will result in more water lost to the ocean as
current water diversion systems in the state cannot capture these higher
peak run off flows. Without projects like the Feeder, our region stands
to face ever-worsening droughts and we will simply have to continue to
watch our only local fresh surface water supply continue to run into the
ocean. It will make our current drought, which is already of historic
proportions, seem like the good old days.

Recognizing the importance of the Feeder, The California State Water
Resources Control Board awarded the project \$4.9 million from
Proposition 50 competitive grant funds. And because they understand that
the project is integral to regional water planning, the Feeder is
supported by water agencies upstream in San Bernardino County and
downstream in Orange County. This bill is also supported by and fully
consistent with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California's
Integrated Resource Plan, the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority's
Integrated Watershed Plan, the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water
District's Integrated Resource Plan, and the water management plans for
the cities of Riverside, Norco and Corona as well as the Elsinore Valley
Municipal Water District.

The federal nexus of this project to current Reclamation projects is
clear and compelling. New usable water supplies created by the Feeder
would replace imported water from Colorado River and the California
State Water Project sources in times of drought or other shortages.

By better managing our precious imported water supplies, it supports the
Secretary of the Interior's role as Watermaster of the Lower Colorado
River. We believe constructing the Feeder is crucial to the State of
California's effort to implement the Quantification Settlement Agreement
(QSA), a key foundation for future Lower Colorado River management by
the Secretary. Also, projects such as the Feeder can be a far more
effective means to QSA implementation than relying on agricultural
transfers as a long-term supplemental water supply.

Further, projects like the Feeder will be integral to the implementation
of the new "Seven States Agreement" in the Colorado River Basin. We are
all very pleased that this accord has been signed. It is now time to
build projects which help address shortages on the Colorado River and
help to augment the rise of water storage levels in both Lake Powell and
Lake Mead under the newly minted Colorado River Basin reservoir
management criteria approved by the seven states and adopted by
Interior.

The water supplies imported by the State Water Project are now
negatively impacted by the recent federal court ruling on the Delta
smelt. Water interests across the state can no longer rely on "business
as usual" water supplies from the Delta, and need to find and develop
new local sources of water that are more reliable than imported water.

In our region, we have an acute need to find these new sources because
portions of the District's service area are 100 percent reliant upon
imported state water supplies. Fortunately, our District is well along
that path with the Feeder and, with federal authorization for the
project, we can step in quickly to minimize the damage caused by
shortages that will hit southern California as a result of the Delta
smelt decision.

Finally, there are very important environmental remediation benefits of
the Feeder project. Up to half of the project's wells could be placed
within plumes of volatile organic compounds (VOC's) and perchlorate
which have polluted groundwater basins in the District through the prior
industrial and agricultural uses in the region. Much of the perchlorate
in the groundwater is the result of Department of Defense munitions
manufacturing. These new Feeder injection wells could annually remediate
up to 20,000 acre-feet of currently contaminated water per year.

Detailed Feasibility Studies and environmental reports have been
prepared and approved by District personnel and contracted professional
engineers, and have been certified by the State of California. The
District is working diligently to continue implementation efforts for
the Feeder. We will continue to work closely with the Reclamation's
Temecula area office to coordinate engineering and environmental work
necessary to complete the project.

To conclude, the Feeder is a project that has been vetted and studied
and will create new water, improve groundwater quality, and reduce our
reliance on the Colorado River and the State Water Project. We look
forward to continuing and strengthening our relationship with
Reclamation in order to design and build this crucial water supply
project. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I would answer any questions you
or the Committee may have at this time.