Feinstein Dumps Plan To Rush Through Drought Bill By 12/11 Without Public Input, Oversight
Retire, Dianne. Retire today.
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Addressing the drought is complicated, technical and politically charged. Billions of dollars in business investments are at stake, so millions are available to push legislators in one direction or another — especially if the key discussions are held behind closed doors.
That's why it's probably a good thing that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) last week abandoned her effort to craft a drought relief bill in haste and through private conversations with Central Valley Republican members of Congress and lobbyists for well-heeled water users. Many of those parties live to overturn the federal Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act, which they say deprive Central Valley growers of desperately needed water.
Feinstein's original goal was to reach agreement with the Republicans by Dec. 11, when Congress goes home for the holidays. Her plan now is to move a bill through the GOP-majority 2015 Senate under "regular order," meaning it will be subject to public committee hearings, presumably with testimony from commercial fishers and environmental advocates who complained they were shut out of the earlier talks.
It isn't entirely clear that shifting from closed-door negotiations in a politically split Congress to open discussions in a uniformly Republican Congress will be a positive step. Environmental advocates have their fingers crossed. "We're not out of the woods," says Doug Obegi, a senior attorney for water issues at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "But regular order does mean that if anything emerges, it will be less bad."
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http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-1130-hiltzik-20141130-column.html#page=1
= new reply since forum marked as read
From the article:
They're right in pointing the finger at those agricultural users. Almond and pistachio farming in the valley —including growers affiliated with the giant Westlands Water District and nearby Paramount Farms, owned by Beverly Hills billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick — is a major factor in unbalanced water allocations statewide. These users hold low-priority water rights, but their crops can't survive a break in supply. They spend lavishly to preserve their water; Westlands' lobbying expenses in Washington have run to roughly $600,000 this year and last.
As my colleague Bettina Boxall reported last month, the parched southwestern valley, dependent on imported water, may be the worst place in California to practice this kind of agriculture. But instead of wise agricultural practices, Westlands has substituted legal actions and lobbying for environmental rollbacks.
The Resnicks have leaned on Feinstein to carry their concerns to government environmental officials. In 2009, Stewart Resnick wrote her to accuse the Interior and Commerce departments of using "sloppy science" to impose environmental restrictions on water allocations to growers and other users, and to demand an "independent science review." Possibly aware that the Resnicks had made $500,000 in political donations over the previous four years, mostly to Democrats, Feinstein passed Resnick's letter on to the agencies' secretaries and endorsed his request. (The National Academy of Sciences later determined, alas, that the restrictions were "scientifically justified."
