The Central Valley is highly regarded as the world’s most productive agricultural region because historically, we have been able to provide abundant, affordable water to irrigate millions of acres of farmland.

Unfortunately, misguided environmental laws have routinely chosen to value small fish over our communities, and Kern County has paid the price in lost jobs and a weakened economy as needed water is pushed to the ocean and current water supplies have become harder and more expensive to obtain. The drought has made a difficult situation much worse, and a recently passed regulations by the state to regulate groundwater will create even further challenges in the future.

Agriculture is the foundation of our Valley’s economy and I have been fighting for over a decade to rollback restrictions that threaten to dry up our farms and devastate our economy. As an Assemblyman, I will continue this work in Sacramento to restore common-sense priorities and get our community the water it needs.

Instead of wasting billions on a fundamentally flawed High Speed Rail project, we should instead allocate that money to build new state reservoirs—something we have not done since the 1970s—in order to store water in the good years and weather the next drought.