Water Supply Must Be Priority

by Jean Fuller
Assemblymember for 32nd District

For too long, legislative gridlock in California has hindered the need to ensure adequate water supplies for the demands of our growing population. Now we are beginning to see the consequences. Soon, we will not have enough water to supply our families, farms and economy. With water supplies falling dangerously low, many communities are facing mandatory rationing. In recent months, things have been made worse by a federal judge ordering mandatory reductions of the water pumped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which supplies drinking water to 25 million people and irrigation to the state’s $27 billion agriculture industry. Here in the Central Valley, lack of water threatens jobs. Farmers in our region have been forced to significantly cut back on the water they receive to grow the crops that feed the world, causing many acres of farm land to go fallow and costing thousands of agriculture workers their jobs.

As the Vice Chair of the Assembly Water Committee, I am fighting hard to ensure that California always has enough water to meet our needs. In the coming months, I will be working with Democrats and Republicans to forge consensus on a comprehensive solution to secure California’s water future.

For me, this means a plan that improves conveyance, builds additional storage and embraces conservation. I believe building more conveyance is the most important step we can take to solve our water crisis. Improving water conveyance from wetter parts of the state in the North to drier areas, like Kern County, must be the cornerstone of any solution. By building new and better infrastructure that will carry water from Northern California down south, we can ensure that California will have sufficient water supply to keep our farms in business, people working and our families healthy. Conservation is essential, and we must embrace every reasonable effort to reduce water usage.

I applaud those who have installed low-flow fixtures and irrigation systems that reduce water use. This is an important part of our effort, but conservation alone is not enough to solve the problem. We must also build new reservoirs to capture more of the rain and snowmelt that flow into the Valley. Even though there has been heavy rainfall in the past few weeks, some of that water went directly into the Pacific Ocean, because we don’t have the reservoir capacity to store it. We need that water captured up north so we can use it down south.

Our state is at a crossroads. If we are to preserve our quality of life and maintain the Central Valley as the top agriculture region in the nation, water infrastructure must be the top priority for the Legislature and Governor this year. It’s time we move beyond spending money on studies and bureaucracy that have done little to secure our water needs. I hope we can come together in the coming months to invest in our water needs by enacting a plan that improves conveyance, increases water storage and protects Californians.