Date: 2002-07-17
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Chairman. I thank the gentleman for yielding me time and for offering this amendment. To follow up on what he said. we have spent the last 15 years cleaning up after the reclamation projects that were started in the 1950s. the 1960s and even into the 1970s. We completely reorganized the Central Utah project. the Central Arizona project. the Garrison project. the Central Valley project in California. Why? Because in 1964 and 1960 and 1970. we made some -very bad decisions about the use of those lands. and the damage from those decisions was now spilling over onto other farmers. onto the cities. onto water users. onto tribes. onto the environment. We have an opportunity here under this amendment to take a realistic look at a very oversubscribed basin on the use of water. And the particular use here is at the behest of Federal leases that are subsidized. at crops. in some cases. that are subsidized or the farmer was growing crops. one subsidized. one unsubsidized. and I am not clear whether or not yet the water is in fact subsidized. That is kind of what makes this basin go. But the spillover effect of this basin is all the way to the Pacific Ocean. and it spills over to the recreational industries. onto tourism industry. onto the farming industry. onto the Pacific Coast fisheries. onto the water qualities issues. and the environmental issues. At a minimum what the gentleman has raised is something we ought to take very seriously because we had a huge outbreak of concern in the Klamath about how we will allocate water between species and farmers and Indians and fish and all the rest of it. We have an opportunity with the renewal of these leases to put some of this in abeyance and see what the impact is on the other entities in what is an area that is clearly oversubscribed. If everybody exercises their water rights. the species. the farmers. the tribes. then we know that it is oversubscribed. That is why we are having this problem. Yes. this might have made sense 40 years ago and it might have made sense at the turn of the century when people came to the Klamath Basin. But the State of Utah made a decision. the State of Arizona made a decision. to some extent the State of California. it does not make sense to keep raising alfalfa in the desert. Because the usage of the water is just too high. especially if .we are doing it on subsidized land. and those are the kinds of changes that have to be made. I do not know if this is the perfect amendment. but we ought not to turn down the serious consideration. what the gentleman is offering here. as. we in the Committee on Resources sit and look at the struggle that is going on in this basin. This may be one of the easier options that we can have in trying to sort out an area that is so terribly over subscribed and short of water for all of the competing uses. all of which have very. very legitimate claims on that water. But as we try to sort it out. I think the gentleman has brought forth one of the tools that might be used that is under the control of the Secretary who has to make some very tough decisions and can try to balance out the competing interests of the parties. I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time.