Assemblyman James Gallagher Jan 28

For California AG today, I'm Mike Stephens. Assemblyman James Gallagher, representing the state's 3rd District, took time to comment on what his main concerns are for this year. I would say my number one is protecting water rights. We have senior water rights in the Sacramento Valley and that's we've always been good stewards of our water, both our by building infrastructure so that we could take advantage of surface water, but also our groundwater in this region. So protecting those water rights and ensuring that those are going to be with us for the long term, ensuring that we build more water storage because we've been in a drought in California, we were in a drought not that long ago. Back in 2011, 2012 and we passed a water bond to ensure that new water storage would be built so that when the next drought came around, we'd be better prepared. Well, we haven't. We haven't built any water storage. There is a prime project that actually is in my district. It's called Sight's Reservoir, and if we built that project, it would it would bring online one point three million acre feet of water that could be used for all the uses that we have in California and make us more resilient long term. So that's probably my biggest priority is getting that project off the ground and done and also protecting our water rights.