GOP bills seek to expedite building more storage facilities

E&E News
By Anne Mulkern
February 6, 2014

Duplicative government hurdles block needed development of water storage facilities and should be streamlined, Republicans said yesterday at a hearing on legislation seeking to cut red tape.

GOP members of the House Natural Resources Committee's Subcommittee on Water and Power pointed to the extreme drought in California as among the reasons that changes are needed. If regulations had been eliminated earlier, they said, there might be more water available in parched states.

"Droughts are not preventable, but suffering from droughts is preventable," House Natural Resources Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) said at the hearing. "Water is abundant, but it is unevenly distributed over time and space."

The subcommittee hearing examined two bills and a discussion draft on water issues. The first, H.R. 3980 from Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), would collapse federal, state and local approvals of dams and other surface-level storage facilities into one stop, controlled by the Bureau of Reclamation.

H.R. 3981 from Hastings would allow water users to pay in advance contracts they have with the U.S. government. Those water users now are not allowed to pay early or pay more than their monthly obligation. A large goal of the bill would be to accelerate revenue to the federal government that could be used for surface storage projects.

The discussion draft would amend the Secure Water Act of 2009 to give the Interior Department $400 million annually to build surface water storage.

The hearing came as House Republicans push water issues with multiple bills. Yesterday, the House on a 229-191 mostly party-line vote passed H.R. 3964, the "Sacramento-San Joaquin Emergency Water Delivery Act." It seeks to provide farmers with more water by reversing environmental protections for fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta (see related story).

At the hearing, Democrats on the subcommittee said that while the drought is real, the legislation just focused on one possible solution and ignored others.

"It doesn't look at groundwater. It doesn't look at efficiency, water recycling, desalination, education, etc.," said Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-Calif.), the subcommittee's ranking member. "It also attempts to pay for new storage through prepayment of debt owed on projects built over 50 years ago."

"Even if this process is allowed," she added, "it is unclear that they would take the option to prepay their debt given the 40 years interest-free -- I would say subsidized -- repayment period."

She and other Democrats also noted that the storage, even if built, would take years and not provide California with any new water. Republicans said action is needed now because the storage would be there for future times of low precipitation.

'Unconscionable' permitting delays

Patrick O'Toole, president of the Oregon-based Family Farm Alliance, told the subcommittee that government roadblocks do pose a major obstacle to the building of storage facilities. The alliance represents family farmers, ranchers, irrigation districts and allied industries in 17 Western states.

"My personal experience is that it took 14 years to permit a project in our valley that was crucial to us," O'Toole said. "It was built in two years.

"The time it takes to permit projects is unconscionable," he added. "Multiple bites of the apple by the federal system took so much time."

As a result, the project that needed to be 50,000 acre-feet ended up as only 25,000 acre-feet, he said.

O'Toole added that "there's a revolution going on in the West right now," as watershed groups come together to seek changes. "We realize that single-purpose dams are not appropriate, but the federal system hasn't moved fast enough to take advantage of that opportunity."

Chris Hurd, a San Joaquin Valley farmer and Family Farm Alliance board member, told the subcommittee that farmers are suffering.

"Hardship abounds in California," Hurd said, noting that California has eliminated for now deliveries of water to farms and water agencies under the State Water Project, which normally supplies 25 million people and 700,000 acres of farmland.

Schools are closing, Hurd said, "vendors are going broke ... there are food lines forming."

Steve Ellis, vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense, told lawmakers that they should review taxpayer subsidies of water.

"We agree that Congress should take a fresh look at the underlying contractual relationships between federal taxpayers and the recipients of water from federal reclamation projects across the 17 Western states," Ellis said.

"The century-old goal of using subsidized water projects and other means to encourage settlement and development" of the West has been "met and exceeded," he said. The drought underscores the challenges that are created by policies that have kept subsidies in place, Ellis said, adding that Congress should look at whether going to market-based pricing would be better.

But on H.R. 3981, Ellis said that his group was concerned about the "one-size-fits-all approach."

"Past legislation addressing project prepayment has involved a congressional judgment regarding project-specific changes," Ellis said. "This legislation abdicates congressional oversight, leaving the decision regarding prepayment entirely in the hands of water users. For larger projects, this might lead to a confusing variation among the water recipients in a single project or unit of a project."