March 24, 2021 - Sacramento – Assemblymember Adam C. Gray (D-Merced) released the following statement after the Department of Water Resources announced the state and federal governments were imposing significant water allocation cuts on farmers and other water users:

“California’s water infrastructure is so broken that we can suffer from severe flooding and drought in the same year.

So-called environmentalists have tried to use climate change to justify everything from subsidizing Tesla to banning the car outright. At the same time, they have ignored the impacts of climate change that demand we significantly expand our surface water reservoirs.

Over the next few decades, climate change will cause California’s snowpack to shrink by a third or more because warming temperatures will cause snow to fall as rain instead. That means instead of growing our snowpack during colder months and collecting that snowmelt during spring and summer, we need reservoirs that allow us to collect water all year long. That is the real inconvenient truth for special interests like the Sierra Club and NRDC who religiously oppose any new water storage.

The only significant funding package to address water infrastructure in the last decade was the Water Bond that I helped negotiate in 2014. Since then, my repeated calls for increasing our state's water storage capacity have fallen on deaf ears.

These reductions are evidence that we need to address all of the impacts of climate change instead of only the aspects blessed by the far left."

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Assemblymember Adam C. Gray represents the 21st Assembly District which includes all of Merced County and portions of Stanislaus County.
Source: Assemblymember Adam C. Gray

Related: California Department of Water Resources Adjusts State Water Project Allocation Following Dry Winter Down to 5% of Requested Supplies