SANTA NELLA — Six Republicans held an oversight field hearing Friday in the district of Rep. John Duarte (R-Modesto), hoping to find out why water is in short supply in parts of the Central Valley despite above-average reservoir storage this year.

Members of the U.S. House Natural Resources subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries met in the Ponce de Leon Room at Hotel Mission de Oro, in front of about 100 spectators.

The committee was comprised of Duarte, Reps. Tom McClintock (R-El Dorado Hills), Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale), David Valadao (R-Hanford), Vince Fong (R-Bakersfield), and committee chair Cliff Bentz (R-Oregon). Valadao and Fong are not members of the regular House subcommittee, but were given special permission to attend the discussion since their districts are part of the valley.

Duarte touted the Central Valley as a wonder of nature that has been compromised by politics and extremists.

“You’ve got the largest precipitation bank in the world, the Pacific Ocean, right off the largest watershed in the world, that’s the Sierra-Nevada mountains,” said Duarte. “And below it, the most fertile valley in the world, with a Mediterranean climate. This should’ve been the Western Hemisphere’s Garden of Eden. And it has been … but it’s not doing everything it can do. And only the misguided environmental extremists and the politics of Washington D.C. and California could screw up this setting.”

Duarte then pointed out that California’s water woes aren’t limited to the Central Valley.

“This isn’t just a Central Valley problem,” said Duarte. “Water scarcity in California and water scarcity in the West … is causing intolerable housing costs throughout the Western United States.”

McClintock, meanwhile, pressed witnesses for answers as to why new water storage facilities aren’t being sought in the state.

“Shasta (dam) was built to 600 feet of elevation and it’s designed to be 800 feet,” said McClintock. “Those missing 200 feet … would mean another 9-million-acre feet of water storage on the Sacramento system. Everybody thinks the Colorado is the great river in the United States. It’s a pygmy compared to the Sacramento. Sacramento’s flow is almost twice as much. The difference is we store 60-million-acre feet on the Colorado and we store about 11 million feet on the Sacramento and we lose all the rest of that to ocean every year.”

Josh Weimer, TID’s director of external affairs, seemed to agree with McClintock’s assertion.

“We definitely need the will to build more storage and to capture the water when it’s available,” said Weimer.

However, according to Ron Stork, senior policy staff for environmental agency Friends of the River, raising the level of the Shasta Dam would be in violation of a Wild and Scenic Rivers Act amendment that was signed into law by Republican Gov. George Deukmejian in 1989.

“Mr. McClintock’s vision has some flaws,” said Stork.

Three members of President Biden’s administration were invited to testify before the panel, but declined to attend, according to Duarte. No Democratic members of the subcommittee were in attendance.

"This was a one-sided affair, and the Democrats probably recognized that it wasn’t going to go anywhere,” said Stork. "We have two Democratic senators in California who probably care more about the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and ensuring water quality, than either Mr. McClintock or Mr. Duarte.”

Duarte talked at length about the Folsom South Canal Extension project, which would divert water from the American River.

Again, according to Stork, this would be in conflict with the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, which was signed into California state law in 1972.

“The lower American River is protected by an act signed into law by then-Gov. Ronald Regan, who is widely considered the guiding light of the Republican Party,” said Stork. “Mr. Duarte is barking up the wrong tree here.”

Hilmar attorney Ronda Lucas, a former counsel for MID, was the most vociferous off all those testifying. Before the panel. She described how the Endangered Species Act changed the course of her family’s farm.

“Numerous fish listings under the Endangered Species Act in the early to mid-1990s resulted in our water being shut off,” said Lucas, reading from her prepared statement. “Rather than coming home to farm, I traded a tractor for a law degree in the hope of making change. My story is the story of too many in this country, whose history, dreams, heritage and livelihood have been built around a life calling, only to have these legacies threatened unnecessarily by unelected bureaucrats, who chose water scarcity and permanent drought conditions that wreak havoc but produce little to no actual improvements to fish populations or the environment.”