20b

• Board Meeting Date: 9/18/2007
• Description: CWCB Director's Report
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

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California State Water Resources Control Board, the Southwest Florida Water Management
District, and the California Department of Water Resources.

HOUSE PASSES $20B WATER BILL: The House overwhelmingly passed a $20 billion
water projects bill despite a promised veto by President Bush, who complains the bill is laden
with costly pet projects and shifts new costs onto the government.

Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., rallied support for a bill loaded with Army Corps of Engineers
environmental projects and drinking water and wastewater treatment plants included by Senate
and House negotiators.

Shepherded by Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., chairman of the House TranspOliation and
Infrastructure Committee, the bill was seven years in the making and finally passed the House on
a 381-40 vote.

Administration officials said Bush will veto the bill if it isn't pared down. This year's bill
includes some $3.5 billion for Katrina-damaged Louisiana, plus more than $2 billion for projects
in California and $2 billion for Florida, mostly for restoring the Everglades. Another $1.95
billion is included for seven new locks on the upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers and $1.7
billion for repairing the region's ecology.

But because the bill's authorization now "significantly exceeds the cost of either the House or
Senate bill and contains other unacceptable provisions... the president will veto the bill,"
Portman and Woodley wrote four Senate and House members who oversaw the legislation.

Two senators who are usually polar opposites on environmental issues, Senate Environment
Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and the committee's senior Republican, Sen.
James Inhofe of Oklahoma, each vowed to fight Bush by gaining enough votes - two-thirds in
both chambers - to override a veto.

In May, the Senate approved its version on a 91-4 vote. The House passed a similar bill in April
on a 394-25 vote. Even if a final bill becomes law, the money must be appropriated later.

Controversy over the Army Corps projects has made it difficult to pass the Water Resources
Development Act, which hasn't been renewed since 2000. When Congress first passed the law in
1986, lawmakers envisioned its renewal every two years.

But Congress, wrote POliman and Woodley, must not increase the Army Corps' already huge
backlog of $38 billion in authorized projects by adding new ones for wastewater, drinking water,
sewer overflows, waterfront development, transportation and abandoned mines. Nor should it
approve a bill, they wrote, that would adopt new cost-sharing language for projects "that would
shift potentially billions of dollars of cost" from local governments onto federal taxpayers.

SECRETARY KEMPTHORNE NAMES KAME RAN ONLEY TO WATER AND
SCIENCE: Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced that Kameran L. Onley will
assume responsibilities of the Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, effective immediately.

Flood Protection. Water Project Planning and Finance. Sn-eam and Lake Protection
Water Supply Protection. Conservation Planning