Huffman vows at town hall to protect North Coast water rights
Protecting the North Coast’s waters and the communities that depend on them is a top priority, Congressman Jared Huffman told a town hall at the Eureka High School auditorium Friday night.
Making sure fishermen get timely compensation when they’re barred from fishing and ensuring there is enough water in the area to protect fisheries are two key issues, the San Rafael Democrat said.
“I desperately want to increase funding for all the different resource agencies that would benefit fisheries and other natural resource management,” Huffman said. “It’s been a challenge in recent years. … I think we’re going to need a Congress and an administration that actually wants to invest in our ecosystems and our natural resources.”
Huffman said he’s working on reforming the Fishery Disaster Program “so when fisheries are closed,” as has happened with Dungeness crab and salmon fisheries several times in recent years, there isn’t a “Byzantine lengthy process that unfolds before the federal disaster dollars actually get back to the people that need it.”
In some cases it can take between two and four years, which isn’t a length of time fishermen can afford to be without revenue, Huffman said.
“They’re not the wealthiest people in the world,” Huffman said. “They don’t have the kind of cash flow to stay in business, keep the lights on, when they have to shut down for an entire season.”
The bill Huffman said he’s working on has bipartisan support that has support in the Senate and would dramatically “expedite those dollars getting out the door.”
“That’s probably the most significant thing I can do in the near term to help fishing in this region,” Huffman said.
Huffman was also asked about President Donald Trump’s recent announcement in Bakersfield that more water will be diverted from the rivers to go to farmland.
The federal rules govern how much water can be pumped out of the watersheds of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, which flow from the Sierra Nevada mountains to the San Francisco Bay and provide the state with much of its water for a bustling agriculture industry that supplies two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts and more than a third of its vegetables.
Wednesday, the U.S. Department of the Interior touted the new rules for pledging $1.5 billion of federal and state funds over the next 10 years to restore habitat for endangered species, scientific monitoring of the rivers and improvements to fish hatcheries.
But state officials say the rules would mean less water in the rivers, which would kill more fish. In particular, the low flows would hurt Chinook salmon and steelhead trout, which once a year return to the freshwater rivers from the Pacific Ocean to spawn.
Scientists released a biological opinion for the Central Valley Project last year that said “if you deliver all this water to the San Joaquin Valley, you’re going to increase the chances of making our salmon go extinct,” Huffman said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced Thursday that the state is filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s rule changes that Huffman believes will be successful.
Water is fully allocated in the state of California, Huffman said, so when additional water is taken out of the delta, “a lot of that is going to come out of the Trinity River,” Huffman said.
A lot of this is the result of the wealth and power of one Central Valley water district, the Westlands Water District, “which has its former lobbyist now as the Secretary of Interior,” Huffman said.
“The deck is pretty stacked right now against protecting our rivers and fisheries here on the North Coast,” Huffman said. “And it’s a fight that I will continue to fight.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
By: SONIA WARAICH
Source: Times Standard
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