John Doolittle: “today we come to the floor with a very important bill, the water bill. I am very, very pleased to be able to support it.…”

“today we come to the floor with a very important bill, the water bill. I am very, very pleased to be able to support it. It contains many important projects across the country that can be developed with the passage and enactment of this legislation. I would particularly like to thank for their work on our problem in Sacramento our chairman, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Shuster), and our subcommittee chairman, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert) and their staffs. They have been tremendously helpful, and it has been a very, very difficult problem for us to resolve. I would like to thank my colleagues from the Sacramento region who have been involved with me for months of intense negotiation with our staffs, the gentlemen from California, Mr. Pombo, Mr. Ose, Mr. Herger, and Mr. Matsui. All of us have worked hard to try and come up with a solution. Ultimately that solution that we worked on did not materialize in the exact way that we had desired. But the bottom line is this, Madam Chairman, this bill today enables Sacramento to take a giant step forward in the area of flood control, achieving virtually a 1 hundred percent increase in the level of protection over what we presently have. Madam Chairman, I would be less than candid if I did not say that this is still not what we need. But the truth of the matter is that we will never have what we need until, in one fashion or another, we are able to complete the construction of the Auburn Dam.”