Delta Water Sept 29

Speaker1: For California AG today, I'm Mike Stephens. Congressman Doug LaMalfa, serving in the House of Representatives First District covering Auburn, Chico and Redding recently remarked on the Delta Smelt and biological opinion. He states the Delta Smelt population has been steadily decreasing over the years.

Speaker2: There's a kind of a popular saying or bumper sticker amongst agriculture some years ago. If you like imported oil, you'll love imported food. So at what point are we going to wake up to this because environmental groups are doing a lot of winning on this? Yet at the end of the day, what they're pushing for doesn't actually do much to help the species they claim to be saving the Delta Smelt, which is part of the delta just east of the Bay Area in Northern California. I think since 1992, they've been usurping and taking away more and more water from agriculture, from human use to run through the delta in order to try and keep the salinity level low with a theory that will help the Delta Smelt. The population has continually decreased since that time together. When they do, they're out there doing surveys. They call them trawls. The last several surveys, they haven't found any. They're not finding the specie yet. Hundreds of thousands of acre feet of water and more are just being flushed to the delta because they still have the biological opinions put out by somebody in government and somebody willing to sue to stop the ability that water to be used properly.