Passage of Western Drought Legislation Needed

The Family Farm Alliance represents ag producers throughout the 17 Western states and its focus is protecting water for the West's irrigated ag sector. There are several bills in both the U.S. Senate and the House that are more California-centric and there is a effort to develop a West-wide bill. It is being driven by Senator Murkowski, the Chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee

Executive Director Dan Keppen says that while the West's water challenges are significant now is the time for meaningful legislation to provide federal agencies with more flexibility under existing environmental laws and regulations to encourage a more cooperative approach. He shares

Keppen: "A lot of things could be dealt with in this bill but we are envisioning it will be things that will streamline permitting for new water storage projects, grant programs for water conservation projects, water rights protection issues, alternative financing mechanisms for new infrastructure. What we are hoping for is that the Western drought Bill that gets negotiated and comes out of that committee hopefully takes care of some of the issues that are in the House bill as well so we don't have a lengthy conference process. That is what we are waiting to see. We are hoping that the Energy Committee on the Senate side will see this in order. My organization has been very active in this because it has provisions that affect all 17 Western states. So we're there and they are listening to us too. We want to be sure that there is a package in there that has benefits for Western irrigated agriculture."