Jim Costa: “I thank the gentleman from Marin for yielding me 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to support this amendment offered…”

“I thank the gentleman from Marin for yielding me 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to support this amendment offered by my colleague, Congressman LaMalfa. As I said earlier, we need to fix the broken water system in California because reliability is key. We have a water system that was designed for 20 million people. Today, we have 40 million people living in California. By the year 2030, we are going to have 50 million people living in California. The simple truth is that in the San Joaquin Valley, where I live, which has been ground zero for the impact of an unreliable water supply because of this broken system, we have felt the devastation of the drought. This lack of reliability is due to many factors that have intensified as a result of climate change, impact on regulations, and other factors. Luckily this year, as I noted earlier, it has been a deluge of rain and snow, and for that we are thankful. But we know in California that it is either feast or famine, and so, sadly, we must plan for the future, and that means including surface storage and using subsurface replenishment of our ground water and all the other water tools that are part of this water toolbox that is critical for the long term. We need more storage. We need the underlying legislation that this provides.…”