On the recordJuly 16, 2015
I thank the gentlewoman for yielding on this important issue. Mr. Chairman, some will say they are not voting for this bill because of the challenges they perceive are in it. The biggest problem with this bill is that it doesn't do enough. We need millions of new acre-feet of water. We should be looking at the next generation. I want my kids to farm, but without new water supplies, we continue to see farmers go out of business. That speaks to the security of our food supply as a country. You can't farm with a zero allocation of water, which is why you see the high unemployment, which is why you see farmworkers who are going to be homeless and without jobs this year, which is why you will see more farms go out of business. This is a battle that has gone on for quite some time, but this bill deals with some very small issues that will be very significant this year. We need to have the full debate about what our country is going to do with its water supplies and the greater storage that we are going to need in the future. Yet, we are dealing with some commonsense issues like predator fish? Why would we try to save fish only to allow them to be eaten by a nonnative fish that eats 98 percent of the fish that we are spending millions of dollars to preserve? That is not an environmental solution any more than trucking fish around a river because the river can't handle the fish. If you want to be an extremist, be an extremist and deal with the commonsense solution here.…
