88 



Now, in the Sacramento Valley on the Tehama-Colusa Canal, 

 there are CVP water contractors who have never been provided 

 adequate water supplies. This unit of the CVP was authorized with 

 Congress providing a priority in contracting for them. 



Before contracting was completed, however, then Interior Sec- 

 retary Andrus declared a contracting moratorium associated with 

 environmental concerns in the bay and delta. As a practical matter, 

 this moratorium has never been lifted, with the enactment of the 

 CVPIA serving as a further obstacle to the United States providing 

 to these contractors what had been promised. 



The CVPIA also created additional practical problems which did 

 not serve to advance any particular environmental purpose and, in 

 fact, have sapped the Bureau's limited resources to the extent that 

 we believe progress under the more critical provisions of the 

 CVPIA have been prejudiced. 



For example, it established a destabilizing interim contracting 

 procedure which provides that interim contracts must be entered 

 into for terms of three years, then two years, until certain illusory 

 events occur in the future. H.R. 1906 provides that only one in- 

 terim contract need be negotiated with regular long-term contract- 

 ing to proceed upon the completion of the programmatic environ- 

 mental impact statement. 



Section 4 of H.R. 1906 also seeks to address the uncertainty cre- 

 ated by CVPIA treatment of contract term. Section 4 provides for 

 the mandatory renewal of contracts for successive periods of 25 

 years, thus recreating the stability in water supplies that existed 

 prior to the enactment of the CVPIA. 



Moreover, Section 4 does this without in any way affecting the 

 environmental purposes of the CVPIA. All contracts that would be 

 executed under this section are to include provisions that will allow 

 the environmental purposes of the CVPIA to be enforced and imple- 

 mented. 



Proposed modifications to the CVPIA provisions on water trans- 

 fers and water conservation are geared toward advancing these 

 purposes. The provisions of H.R. 1906 that address these issues 

 and repeal of the "one size fits all" tiered pricing were developed 

 through experience and relate to how things really work as opposed 

 to dealing with these issues on a purely theoretic basis. 



The CVPIA clearly has some major defects. We believe two op- 

 tions exist. The first is to ignore these defects out of some ill-de- 

 fined fear that to modify the CVPIA at all is to destroy its environ- 

 mental effectiveness. The second option is to fix what is defective 

 so that the CVPIA can serve the purposes for which it was written. 

 We do not think that there should be any question about which 

 course is the most appropriate way to proceed. We must fix the de- 

 fective aspects of the CVPIA so that it can serve as an effective ve- 

 hicle to carry out its intended purposes. Thank you. 



[Statement of Mr. Somach may be found at end of hearing.] 



Mr. DOOLITTLE. Thank you. I would like to say to Mr. Thomas, 

 you are going to have that time. We won't go to markup before the 

 August recess so we will welcome your meetings and get your input 

 on this. I mean, I have heard various attributions as to the cause 

 of the decline of the fisheries, whether it is offshore oil drilling, as 



