Congressmen call for Central Valley hearings on water problems

WASHINGTON, D.C.
June 4, 2009 5:44pm

Three Republican congressmen from the Central Valley are calling for congressional hearings into the region’s water problems.

In a letter Thursday to the leaders of the House Natural Resources Committee, U.S. Reps. George Radanovich, R-Mariposa, Devin Nunes, R-Visalia, and Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield say the Valley’s water shortages are at least in part caused by flawed human decisions.

They say the San Joaquin Valley and southern California face “crippling job losses and economic disaster” because of federal decisions involving both the Delta smelt, a minnow-like fish that lives only in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and a proposal to curtail further water deliveries to California farms and cities to save salmon, steelhead, green sturgeon, and killer whales.

“Very little has been done to help California’s San Joaquin water-starved communities in the last few months,” the congressmen with in their letter to U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall, the chairman of the committee, and U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, the senior Republican on the panel.

“Red-tape, bureaucratic inertia and lack of adequate funding have made a bad situation even worse in the San Joaquin Valley,” they say.

The three call for a hearing by the committee in the Valley this summer “where Congress can listen firsthand to impacted citizens and tour the nearby area.”

Comments on this story

Mark Spence 6/5/09 8:06 AM
Cry me a river! There is no way a reasonable person can look at the history of Central Valley water development and make a case that the region deserves more water. In the end, there is no way to sustain the unsustainable. Moreover, correcting monumental problems of the past means cutting back.

Mary 6/30/09 1:46 AM
The order of importance is: save people over smelt. Seems like a no-brainer to me. The loss of 80,000 jobs in a bankrupt California also would be a monumetal disaster. Seems like all production is moving out of the US; now food...very scary. Someone needs to tell the environmentalists that the economy comes before smelt, too. We no longer have "sunshine and lollipops." Compromises need to be made to accommodate our current situation.