63 



Mr. PoMBO. But we are also talking about during the time of the 

 contract that the contract was not fulfilled. 



Mr. Miller. Well, they came to me in the middle of my contract 

 and said I had to conserve water in my district. They said I was 

 going to have to pay more for it. That is what every urban person 

 in the United States went through. 



Mr. DOOLITTLE. All right. Gentlemen, thanks to the Contract 

 with America, we have got six minutes to go vote. We thank the 

 witnesses, and the panel is excused. We will recess. 



[Recess.] 



Mr. DOOLITTLE. We will reconvene with panel two; invite our wit- 

 nesses to come forward. We have on this panel Mr. Thomas J. 

 Graff, Senior Attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund; Mr. 

 Jeff Kerry, Vice President of Grassland Water District; and one 

 soon to be up there we hope, Mr. Richard Moss, General Manager 

 of the Friant Water Users Authority. And let us begin with Mr. 

 Graff. 



STATEMENT OF THOMAS J. GRAFF, SENIOR ATTORNEY, 

 ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND 



Mr. Graff. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a pleasure to be here 

 today. Hopefully the length of the prior panel and the questions of 

 the members mean that you are all done with questions when it 

 comes to my testimony. I prepared lengthy testimony and squeezed 

 it into your 12-page limit, and I will do my best to summarize it 

 and just hit a few of the highlights. And then, of course, if you do 

 have questions, I would be happy to try to address them. 



The basic position we take today is that we believe H.R. 1906 is 

 legislation that should not have been introduced and that it should 

 not be passed. Now, before I go into specifics on why I believe that 

 to be the case, I do want to call the committee's attention to my 

 effort in my prepared testimony to go through some of the history 

 of my own involvement and of the Environmental Defense Fund's 

 involvement in California water over the last 20 plus years. 



What I put all that in there for was to demonstrate that we have 

 done, consistent with our basic mission, as much as we could to try 

 to address the interests of other constituencies in the state, as we 

 have advocated on behalf of our interests. We have seen merit 

 sometimes in things that some others in the environmental commu- 

 nity have not. 



In particular, we went out alone, I would say, early in the 1980's 

 on behalf of water marketing and water transfers with a more 

 business-oriented perspective than was probably applauded by oth- 

 ers within our community at that time, or pretty much by anyone 

 else, and that I believe is something that now is embedded in the 

 CVPIA. And what we are talking about now hopefully are fine 

 points, while most of the interest groups in the state at least pro- 

 fess a commitment to water marketing. 



Jumping then to 1992 and skipping over the rest of that history, 

 I would have to agree with the statement that the Chairman of the 

 committee made earlier today that it is correct that the CVPIA was 

 not a consensus piece of legislation. It was, however, the product 

 of a very broad-based coalition consisting of representatives of a 

 very large number of groups within California and outside, includ- 



