Doug LaMalfa

To the waters of the United States, this really is a vast overreach of property rights, and we need you to be a strong voice to have sense restored back to that.

We really need your strong voice in those discussions you have with fellow Secretaries, and in the Administration.

Isn't that where really the hang-up is?

I am pleased the committee and Chairman Hastings are taking leadership on this issue and look forward to moving this measure forward.

This measure will allow us to move forward with desperately needed projects like Sites that will end the gap in California's water supply that will only continue to grow if we do not take action.

I am pleased that we are hearing this key measure today, one that will help with the development of surface storage projects across the West, including in my own region in California, which has had the failure to adequately update our…

It is interesting, the whole spectrum of this debate here, where as was mentioned $150 million studying Sites Reservoir.

The cost of the Federal Government is in the multi, multi millions. And that is why it is imperative that these lands be transferred from the Federal Government to the states so that we can survive.

Congressional oversight and legislative solutions are necessary to provide an effective check on Federal officials who abuse their regulatory powers.

Government agencies, through individual and collective efforts, are actively using land designations and restrictions, prompted mainly by radical environmental groups, to curtail multiple use on Federal lands.

Congress has not provided victims of Federal bullying a legal recourse to seek a remedy for damages.

Whatever it is, that's a huge number.

The captain of the ship goes with the ship, and if the ship goes down, the captain goes down with the ship.

I represent far Northern California, very large district with a very significant veterans' population who have been very frustrated.

If we are doing more of this, we are having a lot more effect, plus positive timber receipts at the same time.

So it really needs to be looked at that way, and get to the right size population on the horse population.

Can we count on your advocacy to say, 'Look, don't stop these harvest activities and other things that we need to be doing in the forest; they don't really have anything to do with the fungus'?

I think it needs to be withdrawn because this is really a shot across the bow of all of us in the West.

They might think it is OK this day, this week, and then the next time you go to do it on a different field, changing a crop, plowing or whatever, you might have a different bureaucrat that shows up and says, 'You cannot do that, and we are…

This is the scary part for my growers, for my constituents because they are subjective.

They feel like, as in my opening statement, if they want to change their irrigation system in any way now they are going to be subject to that being a waterway of the United States or somehow navigable.

For me it comes down to what provides the most freedom.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the administration's proposal would insert Federal control into land use decisions in virtually all of California and the Central Valley.

We have seen Federal agencies...attack activities that are specifically exempted in the Act, exempted in the Act from regulation, particularly farming activities like maintaining irrigation systems.

Does this mean the administration now intends to regulate puddles? It certainly appears to be the case.