Lawmakers spar over bill to streamline dam building

E&E News
By Annie Snider
September 11, 2014

With California farmers wringing their hands over parched fields and withering orchards, Golden State lawmakers yesterday clashed over a measure aimed at smoothing the path to new dams.

House Republicans, including California Rep. Tom McClintock, chairman of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water and Power, contend that onerous environmental reviews are putting the brakes on new water storage projects.

"Droughts are nature's fault; water shortages are our fault," he said yesterday at a subcommittee hearing on legislation from full committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) aimed at streamlining review processes under the National Environmental Policy Act.

"The fact is, the federal government has not built a major reservoir in California since the New Melones Dam in 1979; meanwhile, the population's nearly doubled," McClintock continued. "We will not solve our water shortages until we build more dams, and we will not build more dams until we've fundamentally reformed the environmental laws that make their construction cost-prohibitive."

Hastings' bill, H.R. 5412, would apply a suite of environmental streamlining provisions approved by Congress for projects built by the Army Corps of Engineers to the nation's other primary dam builder, the Bureau of Reclamation. Among the provisions are limits on public comment periods for environmental analyses under NEPA and financial penalties for agencies that miss deadlines for opinions, permits or other items.

Recipients of Reclamation water lauded the legislation during yesterday's hearing, pointing to specific projects they hoped to move forward.

"California's existing water storage projects were built to serve as our savings account during times of drought like this -- a dynamic that served us well for many years," testified Jeffrey Sutton, general manager of the Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority in Willows, Calif. "Unfortunately, legislative mandates and regulatory actions greatly reduced the utility and flexibility of these tools."

But environmentalists and many Democrats contend that the reason new federal dams aren't being built has little to do with environmental requirements and everything to do with steep project costs.

"This bill continues to mistakenly blame the environmental law for the lack of compensation or appropriations for important water projects in the West," said California Democratic Rep. Grace Napolitano, ranking member of the subcommittee. "Cutting the public out of projects by bulldozing over federal processes that have been in place for 40 years simply doesn't work in California, and it creates a lot of environmental problems, plus only attorneys make money on this."

Reclamation declined to send a witness to the hearing, saying in brief written testimony that the department did not have adequate time to prepare, having received the bill just last week.

The bureau said, though, that it is not aware of "any Reclamation surface water storage projects that have been denied construction because of delays associated with project review or permitting."

Reclamation acknowledged that there are more than two dozen authorized but unconstructed Reclamation projects but said that "project economics and the pricing and repayment challenges within the potential markets where projects would be built are the primary reasons" projects aren't moving forward.

Committee Democrats contended that major federal projects have been bad deals for federal taxpayers. They pointed to a Government Accountability Office report released ahead of the hearing that showed irrigators still owe $1.6 billion for their share of Reclamation projects and noted that California's workhorse water delivery system, the Central Valley Project (CVP), has fallen far behind in its payments to the federal government (Greenwire, Sept. 10).

Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat and former attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, pointed out that while federal projects have been stalled in recent years, private dam projects have moved forward but said that the economics are often difficult, given that agricultural users are accustomed to receiving subsidized water.

"It's fanciful, at best, given the deficit nature of where the CVP is in its repayment obligation to the United States, to assume that somehow we're going to come up with a whole bunch of new money to build surface storage for folks who haven't chosen to go and create their own financing plan and their own project and do it themselves," Huffman said.

But Rep. Jim Costa, a Democrat representing a Central Valley district, said the state needs a panoply of tools to deal with water shortages, new reservoirs being one of them. He said he supported the goals of the legislation, pointing to much-discussed projects such as raising the dam at California's largest reservoir, Lake Shasta.

"We've been studying raising Shasta for, gee, over 10 years, almost 20 years; I don't know how much more we can study this," Costa said. "We either do it or not."

Republican members of the committee pointed to the fact that Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Water Resources Reform and Development Act that contained the NEPA reforms for the Army Corps, suggesting that the issue should be noncontroversial.

But Napolitano noted that the vote was part of a compromise. She also said she and others remain concerned about the NEPA changes.

Indeed, environmental groups sent a letter to lawmakers earlier this week opposing the new Hastings measure.

"Limiting NEPA will not prevent project delays," they wrote. "But it will allow potentially damaging development without conducting analyses of its effects or implementing safeguards to mitigate impacts."