March 01, 2017

Senator Harris Welcomes California’s Secretary Laird to Discuss Flood Risks at DC Hearing

Senator Harris Welcomes California's Secretary Laird to Discuss Flood Risks at DC Hearing

HD Video: https://s3.amazonaws.com/sdmc-media.senate.gov/HARRIS/Harris+3-1.mp4

Today, U.S. Senator Kamala D. Harris (D-CA), a member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, introduced John Laird, California Secretary for Natural Resources, at a committee hearing and questioned him on the resources needed to address flood risks and water infrastructure maintenance in California.

Harris raised the unified response by local California officials to the recent emergency spillway overflow at the Oroville Dam, and noted the Sacramento San Joaquin River Delta as an example of the need for federal, state, and local governments to come together and rebuild the aging infrastructure across the nation.

"Recent events in my home state highlight the necessity of Congress's support in assisting our state and local partners to maintain, repair, and upgrade our nation's aging infrastructure - and especially when it comes to critical systems that could threaten the public safety of all Americans," Harris said.

During the Oroville Dam emergency, Harris and California U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein supported Governor Jerry Brown's request for an emergency declaration, which President Trump approved. Last week, Harris visited the Oroville Dam and received a briefing from local California officials on the damage and repair work to the Dam's emergency spillway. Governor Jerry Brown recently proposed $437 million for near-term flood control and emergency needs across California.

A full transcript of Senator Harris' opening statement and questioning is below:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member Carper, for scheduling this important hearing as recent events in my home state highlight the necessity of Congress's support in assisting our state and local partners to maintain, repair, and upgrade our nation's aging infrastructure - and especially, when it comes to critical systems that could threaten the public safety of all Americans.

It is my distinct pleasure to introduce the Secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, John Laird. Secretary Laird has over 40 years of experience working in public service, ranging from a budget analyst for then-U.S. Representative Jerome Waldie, a local elected-official as Santa Cruz City Councilman and Mayor, and as a state legislator, where he chaired the California Assembly Budget Committee and I had the pleasure of working with him throughout those years, both when I was District Attorney of San Francisco and as Attorney General [of California].

In his current role as Secretary of Natural Resources, he manages California's ecological and cultural resources, water reserves and supplies, and statewide environmental policies. Within his agency, he oversees thirty sub-departments including the California Department of Water Resources, which is the lead agency working around-the-clock to repair Oroville Dam and to prevent catastrophic flooding.

Mr. Chairman, last week Secretary Laird and I had a chance to tour Oroville Dam together and he had an extraordinary understanding of the technical aspects of the dam and levee infrastructure. I also want to comment that as he and I both noticed, it was an extraordinary example at the dam of federal, state, and local agencies coming together to meet a need that was really a crisis in terms of its proportion. We saw folks that ranged from members of the National Guard, the United States Navy, FEMA, and California emergency services together with local Butte County Sherriff Kory Honea who came together to meet the challenge and the need, and they did it in a seamless way.

And it goes without saying that Secretary Laird has extensive knowledge of the needs of our nation and the needs we should consider when it comes to sufficiently maintaining our infrastructure and flood management systems. This, combined with his budgetary experience at all levels of government, can shed light on how Congress should leverage funding streams to help address our aging infrastructure.

I know that in California alone, there are approximately 1,400 dams and nearly half of those are designated as "high hazard potential" by state officials. Realizing the devastation that could be caused by an aging dam infrastructure, California has invested approximately $11 billion in flood control management in the past decade to protect nearly 7 million people and $580 billion worth of assets - which include buildings, farmland, and crops - that are at risk. The need for improvements aren't solely in California. For example, in states like Wyoming we have invested more than $1.2 billion of their state's funding for water infrastructure improvements, water storage and supply projects, recycled and wastewater management and treatment, and drought and emergency water relief programs since 1975. In addition, according to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials, it is estimated that non-federally owned dams throughout our nation represent 96% of all dams in the United States and would need more than $60 billion to sufficiently repair, which is a third of the cost that is urgently needed to repair the high-hazard dams identified by the Association. This demonstrates that the need is great across our nation. And that is why I greatly appreciate the Chairman's willingness to continue prioritizing this conversation and I look forward to working with my colleagues on this Committee to continue federal support that is necessary and critical to maintain our infrastructure nationwide.

I look forward to hearing from you, Mr. Secretary, welcome, and I appreciate all the members of the Committee and other witnesses for being here to discuss this crucial topic. Thank you.

QUESTIONING

Senator Harris: Secretary Laird, you and I know about the longstanding debates in California about water. A very famous person once said, "Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting", and so one place in California that highlights that point is the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta. Will you talk a little bit about your observations and analysis of the infrastructure in the Delta? It is often the subject of debate about where that precious water goes in terms of the farmers that rely on it and also environmentalist who are concerned, rightly, about the endangered species that live in that body of water. And that seems to occupy a lot of the discussion about the Delta but I have a concern about another point which is that we may not have that debate if the infrastructure that supports the Delta is compromised or is weak in any way. So please, if you could address that.

Secretary Laird: Thank you Senator, that's a very good question and for the uninitiated, all those rivers flow into the one place and then through an estuary to the ocean, and there's hundreds and hundreds of miles of levees that have created what are known as the Delta Islands which have been farmed in a way that now they've dropped to 20-25 feet below sea level. And they're protected by levees that were initially constructed to be agricultural levees and not ocean, urban levees. And we just had a break in the last two weeks in the middle of a storm. The Delta Island flooded and it will be hard to clean up and repair. And the challenges are - Senator Whitehouse mentioned sea level rise - if there is a one foot sea level rise, it would change a flood event in the western delta from 100 years to 10 years, meaning more frequency. With the subsidence in these islands, if there were a major seismic event and a number of these levees failed, salt water would actually drain from the San Francisco bay into the delta and you would have real difficulty recovering farmland. There might be an interruption of water supply. And so the question is - it's a huge ticket to do all the repair work that might need to be done. The voters in 2006 brought $3 billion to the table, the voters in 2014 brought $7.5 billion to the table for everything, the flood control we're talking about here, storage, and some of these levee improvements, and so we know we have a lot to do. We're trying to do the high priority projects and it is a complex system. The one other thing is some of these islands are not very highly inhabited, so one where they did the evacuations where the levee breached in the last two weeks, they evacuated 20 homes. Well you can imagine if that's the tax base to do the kind of repairs that need to be done, it looks to state and federal and other entities to really help or else you can't complete it.

H: And to emphasize the significance of it, that body of water is the largest estuary on the west coast, isn't that correct?

L: It is.

H: And the farmland that that body of water supports produces 50% of the fruits and vegetables consumed by the nation.

L: The federal and state water projects together in the Central Valley provide water to 3 million acres of irrigated agriculture. And so the question is there could be an interruption in water supply for that, but there could be just damage to farmland itself in the Delta without the breaks happening.

H: So how can my colleagues and I support what California needs to do to make sure that the infrastructure around that body of water in addition to the Oroville Dam is supported, understanding that the ramifications are pretty extreme and national in terms of the exposure and consequence if we don't repair it?

L: I think that really we're bringing all this money to the table and the question is, within the flexibility of the federal government, can you have loan guarantees? Only 3% of the dams in California are state dams and so there's some places where there's local districts or there's a private entity - utility companies have a number of these dams - that a loan guarantee would make all the difference in terms of them being able to finance the repairs or the upkeep. And obviously if there's an infrastructure bank or revolving loan fund or other things, those would be helpful as well. If you look at the Central Valley of California, it flooded regularly for 80 years from statehood into the 1930s and there were two reasons. They couldn't correctly measure how much water was going by and everything that was designed was not designed for the capacity, but the federal government stepped in in the 1930s and joined with the state and locals and with that breathe of economic support, that brought the modern flood system with weirs and levees and other things that Sacramento is second only to New Orleans in danger from a catastrophic flood event, and it is that effort that has protected Sacramento and other areas in that time.

H: Thank you, thank you.

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