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Mr. Chairman and Members of the Water and Power Subcommittee, thank you for 

 providing me with the opportimity to testify before you today on H.R. 1906, the Central 

 Valley Project Reform Act of 1995. I am Jeff Kerry, the Vice President of the Grassland 

 Water District, but I also serve as First Senior Vice President of the California Waterfowl 

 Association. And, I am also a landowner in the Grassland Resource Conservation 

 District. I am testifying today on behalf of the Grassland Water District, the California 

 Waterfowl Association, the Tulare Basin Wetlands Association, the Oregon Waterfowl 

 and Wetlands Association, and the Alaska Waterfowl Association. Accompanying me 

 today are Dave Widell of the Grassland Water District and Bill Gaines of the California 

 Waterfowl Association. 



Broadly speaking, our organizations believe that we are speaking on behalf of all 

 the wetland, waterfowl and sporting interests up and down the Pacific Flyway. 

 Moreover, I would like to emphasize that we are testifying only with respect to the impact 

 of H.R. 1906 on these interests and the sportsmen and women who support these 

 interests. We do not presume to speak to the host of other issues that will be considered 

 today and in the future. 



Mr. Chairman, before talking specifically about H.R. 1906, 1 would like to take a 

 few minutes to describe the Grassland Water District to you. The organizations on whose 

 behalf I am testifying today believe that the Grassland Water District offers a unique 

 perspective on the management of Central Valley water. We are not in any "camp." 

 We share some of the concerns of the agricultural water contractors because, like them. 

 Grassland Water District also is a water contractor. But we also share some of the 

 concerns of environmental and fishery interests because, like them, we also need to 

 preserve habitat. 



As 1 previously stated, I serve as Vice President of the Grassland Water District, 

 but 1 also am, like thousands of others, a landowner within the Grassland Ecological area 

 -- California's largest remaining wetlands complex. 1 own and maintain 288 acres which 

 is about the average size of a landholding within the Grasslands. In the aggregate, private 

 land makes up over 70 percent of the total Grassland acreage. Grassland landowners, like 

 me, are unique among all of the landowners receiving water through the Central Valley 

 Project because we do not farm crops or livestock, we farm ducks. To do that, we need 

 wetlands. 



1 know there is an ongoing debate in Congress about what constitutes a wetland, 

 and we follow that debate very closely. But for our purposes in the Central Valley and the 

 Pacific Flyway, we need not engage in technical debates about what is a wetland. Simply 

 stated, in order to provide viable wetland habitat we need to manage these lands by 

 applying water according to specific water management regimes. If sufficient land and 

 water is not available in the Central Valley than the ducks will either die or return to their 

 nesting areas in poor shape causing a direct and negative impact on nesting success. This 



