[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 176 (Wednesday, December 7, 2016)]
[House]
[Page H7277]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1030
WRDA CONFERENCE REPORT: WATER FOR CALIFORNIA; FIRE PROTECTION FOR TAHOE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, the conference report on the Water 
Resources Development Act is the product of many hours of good faith 
negotiations between the House and the Senate and between Republicans 
and Democrats. Like any compromise, I don't like everything that is in 
it, but the net effect is an important step forward in protecting 
against the devastation of future droughts in California and 
catastrophic wildfire that threatens Lake Tahoe.
  It provides $335 million for desperately needed surface water 
storage. It opens a new era of hatcheries to provide for burgeoning 
populations of endangered fish species. It adds flexibility to the 
management of New Melones Reservoir and enables water transfers to 
assure that water can be more efficiently moved to where it is the most 
needed. It adds strong protection to northern California area of origin 
water rights. It expedites the review and approval of new projects. It 
updates flood control management criteria to make better use of our 
existing reservoirs.
  I particularly want to highlight the provisions related to Lake 
Tahoe. For many years, we have spent enormous resources to adjust 
drainage in the basin to improve water clarity at the lake. The Senate 
version of the measure, which was introduced this session by Senators 
Heller and Feinstein, continued this effort; but the Heller-Feinstein 
bill neglected the most immediate environmental threat to Lake Tahoe, 
and that is catastrophic wildfire. The Senate bill had no provision for 
forest management, specifically for fire prevention.
  The number of acres burned by wildfire in the Lake Tahoe Basin has 
increased each decade since 1973, including a tenfold increase over the 
past decade. Eighty percent of the Tahoe Basin forests are now densely 
and dangerously overgrown. They are dying. At lower elevations, there 
are now four times as many trees as the land can support. Modeling by 
the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit warns that, in two-thirds of the 
forest, conditions now exist for flame size and intensity that are 
literally explosive. If a super fire of the size we have seen in other 
parts of the Sierra were to strike the Tahoe Basin, it could decimate 
this lake and its surroundings for a generation to come.
  For this reason, Congressman Amodei and I introduced a bill focused 
on fire prevention. This measure was specifically designed, after 
extensive input from fire districts throughout the Tahoe region, to 
reduce excess fuel before it burns. It provides for expediting 
collaborative fuel reduction projects consistent with the Lake Tahoe 
Land and Resource Management Plan, and it calls for funds generated by 
timber sales and other fee-based revenues to stay in the Tahoe Basin to 
provide for further fuels management and other improvements.
  This was falsely portrayed by leftwing activists in the region as a 
substitute for the Senate bill. As Congressman Amodei and I made clear 
repeatedly, it was designed to supplement that bill and fill a glaring 
deficiency that ignored the single greatest environmental hazard to the 
lake.
  I am very pleased to note that the critical provisions of both 
bills--for lake clarity and fire prevention--are now in the conference 
report, thanks to bipartisan negotiations between House and Senate 
negotiators, most notably by Senator Feinstein and House Majority 
Leader McCarthy.
  Unfortunately, in the last 48 hours, Senator Boxer has threatened to 
blindside this effort and destroy the fruit of these years of labor and 
endless hours of negotiation. She has threatened to assemble enough 
votes, not to put forward a positive and credible plan of her own to 
address these critical needs but, rather, to ruin the painstaking 
negotiations of many others just as they are coming to fruition.
  In the last 4 years, the King Fire, the Butte Fire, the Rough Fire, 
and the Rim Fire have destroyed more than 1,000 square miles of forest 
in the Sierra Nevada. If we don't restore sound forest management for 
fire prevention in the Tahoe Basin now, the next fire could reduce its 
magnificent forests to cinders and clog the lake with ash and debris 
for decades to come. We can only pray that wiser heads prevail in the 
Senate and that this conference report is speedily adopted by both 
Houses and signed into law by the President.

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