241 



House Committee on Resources 



Subcommittee on Water and Power 



July 20, 1995 



Statement by Representative Gary A. Condit 

 18th Congressional District, California 



HR1906 



Mr. Chairman and Members, 



I appreciate the opportunity to provide my comments to you regarding HR 1906. I have 

 looked forward to the day that Congress would hold a public hearing regarding the Central 

 Valley Project Improvement Act of 1992, and the punitive impacts of this so-called 

 "improvement" Act. 



As many of you know, I have had serious misgivings regarding the Central Valley Project 

 Improvement Act since it was passed by the Congress in 1992. I voted against the CVPIA, 

 and am now pleased to join a bi-partisan group of California congressional members whose 

 purpose is to remove some of the most pimitive provisions of the CVPIA, and to bring some 

 balance into our water delivery system. 



The CVPIA of 1992 originally passed out of the then House Natural Resources 

 Subcommittee on Water and Power based upon the promise that good faith honest 

 negotiations would continue in order to craft a piece of legislation that would be acceptable 

 to the farming community. Without that promise, this measure would not have passed out of 

 the committee. I was not a member of the then House Natural Resources Committee that 

 wrote the bill, and I voted against it when it came before the full House, because those 

 honest negotiations never did occur. As we all know, the proponents of so-called "reform" 

 were never seriously interested in a balanced approach to this issue, and the result has been a 

 "regulatory drought" of unprecedented proportions. 



We now have unique opportunity to revisit the CVPIA and remove some of its non-sensical 

 provisions, as well as to restructure it in such a way as to bring about the badly needed 

 certainty of water supply to agriculture. HR 1906 would accomplish this by: 



- Repealing the San Joaquin River Comprehensive Plan, thereby ending the 

 threat of the San Joaquin River Restoration plan; 



- Providing for assurances that no more than 800,000 acre-feet of CVP yield 

 would be taken for environmental purposes by crediting water taken for the 

 Endangered Species Act and Bay-Delta water standards toward the 800,000 

 acre obligation for environmental purposes; 



