Josh Harder: Solutions to fire and drought in Stanislaus County and our Valley

The Central Valley is a special place to live. Friday night football games. Hiking in world-famous parks. The best food anywhere in the world, grown just next door.

But right now, so much of what makes our Valley great is in jeopardy, and all you have to do is walk outside and take a breath to feel it.

These massive wildfires and the smoke they create mixed with the terrible drought we’re in right now means everything from football to hiking to planting a year’s worth of crops is teetering on the edge of impossible.

We have a vital bipartisan bill in Congress right now that finally takes on these wildfires and droughts. Twenty Democrats and 20 Republicans came together to write it. I was one of them. As expected, the far left and the far right both took swings at us but we kept moving.

We passed this bipartisan infrastructure bill through the Senate last month and this newspaper called it “a glimmer of hope.” Now it’s time to get it across the finish line.

In order to stop these disastrous wildfires and the smoke they create, we have to hire more firefighters and get them the best tools out there.

This spring, we found out that 30% of the elite firefighter hotshot crews were understaffed because they simply weren’t getting paid enough. So I teamed up with a Republican colleague and successfully pushed President Biden to raise their pay. Just last month our firefighters saw the raise they deserve finally hit their bank accounts.

Now, this bill will build on that effort by hiring 1,000 new full-time firefighters, cleaning up 10 million acres of forest, and building 21st century satellites that can spot a fire the size of a table from space.

For too long, we’ve neglected fire prevention and kicked the can down the road. This bill includes triple what CalFire invests in wildfire fighting so we finally have the people, equipment, and systems we need for years like this one. Our firefighters need this help and our kids deserve to grow up without smoke in their lungs.

Building the water storage we deserve

Since 1979, our state’s population has almost doubled and yet we haven’t built a single new federal water storage project. Without new storage, drought means more layoffs, fewer family farms, and a huge hit to our economy.

Earlier this year I pushed the secretary of the Interior to commit to sending us $65 million for two water projects in our district that will increase storage capacity by more than 200,000 acre-feet, including expanding Los Vaqueros Reservoir and building a new reservoir in Del Puerto Canyon. And this month, the Interior secretary met with Valley farmers to tell us we’re officially getting the funding.

These projects should have been built decades ago so they could have held water for drought years like this one. But building projects in California is difficult, so we need to partner with anyone who’s willing to listen. Let’s be clear though, the work isn’t done until these projects are built.

I’ve been leading a bipartisan coalition with Republican Rep. David Valadao demanding any infrastructure package include money for water storage. We made our voices heard, and we wrote a bipartisan bill with a water investment five times the size of the Hoover Dam. This bill would be jet fuel toward building the resilient water systems our community needs to not just survive droughts, but to continue to be the fruit and nut basket of the world.

Too much of politics these days is people yelling at each other on cable news, too focused on celebrity or scoring political points to work together. This bipartisan infrastructure deal that I helped craft has been criticized by both the far left and the far right.

We don’t have time for shortsighted, petty politics with fires blazing and farmers in dire straits. Fires and drought don’t care about political affiliation, and our country deserves leaders who can put their differences aside to find common ground.