[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 112 (Friday, August 3, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Page S8930]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. BENNETT:
  S. 1361. A bill to amend the Central Utah Project Completion Act to 
clarify the responsibilities of the Secretary of the Interior with 
respect to the Central Utah Project, to redirect unexpended budget 
authority for the Central Utah Project for wastewater treatment and 
reuse and other purposes, to provide for prepayment of repayment 
contracts for municipal and industrial water delivery facilities, and 
to eliminate a deadline for such prepayment; to the Committee on Energy 
and Natural Resources.
  Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation 
that would amend the Central Utah Project Completion Act, CUPCA, as 
originally enacted in 1992. CUPCA re-authorized and provided funding 
for the completion of the Central Utah Project, CUP, a project that 
develops Utah's share of water from the Colorado River for use in ten 
central Utah counties. The CUP was originally authorized in 1956 as 
part of the Colorado River Storage Project Act and includes five units. 
The Bureau of Reclamation began construction of this project in 1964. 
However, in 1992 CUPCA conferred CUP planning and construction 
responsibilities to the Central Utah Water Conservancy District, which 
has cultivated an excellent working relationship with the Office of CUP 
Completion in the Interior Department.
  The legislation I am introducing would amend CUPCA to clarify the 
relationship between the Department of the Interior and the CUP by 
ensuring that the Secretary of the Interior continue to retain full 
responsibility for the CUP after the completion of the project's 
construction phase. It only makes sense that the decisions regarding 
future operations and maintenance, contract negotiations, and program 
oversight functions of the Interior Department are consistent with the 
cooperative decisions made during the project's planning and 
construction stages. As such, language is needed to clarify the 
Secretary's further involvement.
  Since 1992, numerous changes in the project have occurred to better 
reflect contemporary water needs. Certain project features were 
downsized or eliminated while other water management programs grew in 
size. The 106th Congress, in an effort to address these changes, 
approved a CUPCA amendment that allowed unused funding authorization 
resulting from the redesign of the Bonneville Unit to be used ``to 
acquire water and water rights for project purposes including in stream 
flows, to complete project facilities authorized in this title and 
title III, to implement water conservation measure . . .'' In light of 
the continuing need to address the redesign replacement projects 
originally designed in the sixties, my legislation would again extend 
the unused authorization provision to all CUP units.
  Finally, this legislation also extends a CUPCA provision that 
authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to accept prepayment of parts 
of the project's Municipal and Industrial repayment debt. The original 
provision's expiration was to occur in 2002 for reasons relating to the 
Federal Budget scoring process. This provision has enabled the Central 
Utah Water Conservancy District to prepay over $138 million to the 
federal treasury, while also avoiding unnecessary interest charges. The 
legislation introduced today would remove the 2002 expiration provision 
and extends the provision to allow the repayment of obligations 
associated with projects relating to the Uinta Basin.
  The water supplied by CUP's many water diversion projects is crucial 
to the livelihoods of Utah's rural residents and to Utah's burgeoning 
population. I believe that legislation will serve to better facilitate 
the timely, economically responsible, and fiscally efficient completion 
of the Central Utah Project.
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