David Valadao: “The first slide that I wanted to present here is one that I think is very important when we talk about water going out…”

“The first slide that I wanted to present here is one that I think is very important when we talk about water going out into the ocean. The first bar there, the dark blue one, is how much water was flowing through the estuary this past year. The second bar is actually a little bit of an exaggeration. If we took every single reservoir that we propose in this bill, multiplied it by ten-- ten times the amount of storage that we are proposing--we still wouldn't use all that water. There would still be quite a bit of water flowing out into the ocean. So multiply every single project times ten, and we still don't use up all the water. So there was a lot of water wasted this year alone that we had the opportunity to capture if this bill had been presented earlier or passed into law, and we had the opportunity to actually make a difference. Why does that make a difference to so many folks? It makes a difference because the Central Valley is very important to the country. We feed the Nation. When you look at all the different commodities, and this is just a small sample, we produce over 400 different commodities, and a lot of these, a big majority, some of them as much as 99 percent of the different commodities that go through. So everyone sitting at home around the country should pay attention, because this affects their food supply.…”