A long-running fight over California water and the fate of a tiny fish found a new front with a House measure to strip federal protections from the longfin smelt.
Introduced Friday by Rep. Doug LaMalfa and six fellow Golden State Republicans, H.J. Res. 78 would undo the Fish and Wildlife Service’s listing of the longfin smelt’s San Francisco Bay Delta population as endangered.
“This listing is just another example of out-of-touch environmental policies making it harder to store and deliver water in California,” LaMalfa said in a statement first published by LassenNews.com.
“We are already dealing with a maze of arcane and oftentimes conflicting environmental regulations that make it nearly impossible to manage our water supply effectively for Californians up and down the state.”
