Promises to continue to work on flood protection project for Llegas Creek
Published in the June 25-July 8, 2014 issue of Morgan Hill Life
WATCH THE VIDEO OF ZOE LOFGREN BY CLICKING HERE
By Staff Report
Rotary Club of Morgan Hill President Brad Ledwith poses with Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren while congressional assistant/counsel Ali Ramezanzadeh takes their picture during Lofgren’s recent visit with the club.
Photo by Marty Cheek
Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren met with members of the Rotary Club of Morgan Hill June 4 to talk about issues of local and national interest. The main focus on her discussion was water-related topics including the on-going flood protection project for Morgan Hill’s downtown district and the economic and social consequences of California’s most devastating drought in recent history.
“I love representing Morgan Hill. I love coming down here,” she told club members. “You kind of take a little sigh of relief when you come to South County. It’s a great place to be.”
Lofgren represented Morgan Hill when she was first elected to Congress in 1994. Redistricting in 2002 gave the district representation by Congressmen Richard Pombo and Jerry McNerney, but Morgan Hill returned to Lofgren’s representation in 2012 after redistricting put the community in California’s 19th congressional district.
One promise she made with the redistricting is to continue to work on the flood protection project for Llegas Creek, she said.
The project began in the 1950s to manage flooding that often devastates the downtown district. The project doesn’t meet the minimum cost requirements for the Army Corps of Engineers, making it difficult to fund federally, she said. Lofgren and her staff have been working with the Santa Clara Valley Water District and members of the Morgan Hill City Council to find ways to provide a 100-year flood protection of the downtown and some of the agricultural areas that get flood periodically.
“I think we have made some progress,” Lofgren said. “That’s important but to me, to have a wonderful city’s downtown underwater — I mean, this is not the Third World — and we need to have this project dealt with and we need to have a way to pull the money together to make it happen.”
She praised McNerney for allocating $50,000 in federal money from one of his projects to the flooding project to keep the Army Corp and water district on track. This enabled the water district to lead in the design component of the project, which is almost done, she said.
Lofgren also talked in depth about the drought now impacting California. The drought is now 50 percent worse than California’s last major drought period.
She spoke about driving Interstate 5 through the Central Valley region and seeing signs that read: “Congress is responsible for the dust bowl.”
“I didn’t know we were that powerful that we could keep it from raining,” she said. “We now have 5 percent of normal in the snow pack, and we’re going to have drastic reductions in our allocations of our state and federal water systems to the Central Valley. There’s going to be tremendous reductions in ag production. There’s going to be unemployment as a consequence of this.”
One of the lessons from the drought is that Californians need to learn to prepare for the future, she said.
“We need to have off-stream storage of our water more than we have today,” she said.
Lofgren also addressed questions on subjects such as surveillance by the National Security Agency, proposed FCC changes to net neutrality policy, H-1B visa issues and immigration.
She told the Rotary members that immigration is a “very volatile subject” in Washington, D.C., because of the strong partisan politics relating to it. House members of both the Republican and Democrat parties held secret meetings for several years to discuss the subject.
“We had a secret bipartisan group of about 20 to 25 people and we met for four years without anyone finding out that we were meeting,” she said. “Why did we meet in secret? Because for the Republican members, particularly those from the South, they were exposing themselves to a lot of political attacks by discussing this subject.”
The members in the group came up with a broad range of options to manage the immigration challenges and even wrote a bill after they reached common ground, she said. The Republican leadership, however, sabotaged the bill before it could be brought to a vote, she added.
