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ronmental users in my district. I represent the other side of the 

 delta from where Greorge is. 



I also have a fishing interest in my district. I also have what is 

 considered northern California water in my district. I also have 

 part of my district that is very heavily dependent upon water wells 

 for irrigation and for urban users. So my district probably rep- 

 resents just about everything there is in California in terms of 

 water. 



You make the statement about the $500 an acre foot farmers 

 down in southern California. The biggest pressure in the world on 

 those guys to develop their property is $500 an acre foot water. 

 And I have had people from the environmental community stream 

 through my office over the past two years and talk to me about pre- 

 serving our farmland and preserving the open space and how im- 

 portant that is for California and for the quality of life of Califor- 

 nia. And yet at the same token, they want to do things that force 

 the increase in the price of water which the economic result of that 

 being development of more farmland. 



And you can't have it both ways. You can't maintain agriculture 

 in California which is the number 1 industry in California, the big- 

 gest employer, the most money that comes into California — ^you 

 can't maintain that at the same time you are trying to put the guys 

 out of business. It is impossible. 



The other side of that is you made the statement about the plas- 

 tic tubes that take water down to the roots. I would invite you to 

 come back to the Central Valley of California today £ind look at 

 what we are doing today as a result of the drought and as a result 

 of the CVPIA, and as a result of increased water costs. 



It is very common today for us to have tube irrigation systems 

 in all of our permanent crops. It is not an oddity. It is not some- 

 thing that they are only doing in southern California with $500 an 

 acre foot water. It is a reality that we face today in agriculture in 

 California. You rarely see flood irrigation in California anjrmore, at 

 least in my part of the world. It is extremely rare today. 



It is causing other problems. Before when we had flood irriga- 

 tion, we would leach the salts out of the field. We did not have the 

 kind of salt buildup that we are having today in the fields. I had 

 a guy come in to see me a couple of weeks ago that said that they 

 have noticed that at the end of their fields they are all of a sudden 

 having dramatic drops in production because they don't let the 

 water run out anymore because they keep it in the field. And the 

 guys downstream from them who previously had used that water 

 for irrigation don't have it anymore. 



I mean, what we are trying to do with this bill is to go back in 

 and try to fix some of the unintended consequences that we think 

 happened by that. And we are trying to listen to all sides in this 

 debate and trying to accommodate everyone knowing that not ev- 

 eryone is going to get what they wanted. 



And at times it is extremely frustrating to have some of the stuff 

 that has been put out about this bill that says we are tr3dng to gut 

 the CVPIA, that we are trying to undo the Bay-Delta Accord be- 

 cause it would have been easy for us to do that. We could have put 

 out a bill that just, quite frankly, repealed the CVPIA from the 

 very beginning, but we did not do that. We tried to go in and fix 



