George Miller: “we have an opportunity to do it right. One of the reasons this has been so extensive is because my colleagues on the…”

“we have an opportunity to do it right. One of the reasons this has been so extensive is because my colleagues on the other side, rightfully so, we were doing this in the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta in the Central Valley of California, the agencies were directed to go out and to meet and to confer and to deal with local governments, with the site managers on the public lands, on the forests and the resource agencies and to take this into account and to work with these people. That is very extensive. It is also a very expensive proposition. If we had not done that, we would have obviously been criticized, the report would have been criticized for not consulting with these individuals. Now, it would have been less expensive but we would have found another basis on which to criticize the report. But the point is that people understand that the science here is valid. I appreciate just as we did not like to hear in our region of California that we would now have to spend $1 billion correcting the past mistakes if we are in fact going to protect the San Francisco Bay and the San Francisco Delta and be able to provide for agriculture in the Central Valley. We got bad news, too. So did the people in the Everglades because of the history of terrible actions. They now have to go back and repair that. This is an opportunity to go back and to restore the environmental integrity of this region and forgo the litigation.”