House Republicans from California are questioning the Biden administration’s draft plans for one of the state’s major water delivery projects, asserting the proposals “disproportionately favor environmental objectives” over agricultural users.
California Rep. David Valadao and nearly a dozen of his GOP colleagues inked a Wednesday letter to the Bureau of Reclamation, the Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries, urging the agencies to give more consideration to agriculture users who rely on the federal Central Valley Project (CVP) and State Water Project.
The administration is weighing new operating plans for the CVP, which along with the State Water Project moves flows from California’s wetter north to farmland in the south.
That process was spurred, in part, by the Interior Department’s decision to reassess a Trump-era biological opinion that would have delivered more water from the ecologically sensitive Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta east of San Francisco to farmers in the Central Valley.
