Lawmakers Seek U.S. Drought Aid : Disaster relief: The effort must overcome budget concerns and anti-California sentiment in the House. Another bill would lift restrictions on water use.

Californians in Congress, working closely with Gov. Pete Wilson, said Wednesday that they will seek several billion dollars in federal disaster aid to compensate farmers for crop losses caused by the state’s record drought.

In addition, key California lawmakers said they will press hard for legislation to lift federal restrictions that prevent farmers from selling excess irrigation water to cities and towns willing to buy it.

The request for multibillion-dollar disaster relief faces formidable obstacles, including widespread anti-California sentiment in the House and resistance to massive new spending programs at a time when the budget deficit is larger than ever.

Both President Bush and Congress would have to designate the drought as a dire emergency to get around a pay-as-you-go provision in the new budget agreement that requires offsetting any aid with higher taxes or spending cuts.

Sipping a glass of California wine that he joked cost less than a tumbler of water back home, Wilson confirmed Tuesday night that he will ask the state’s 45 members of the House and two U.S. Senators to support a multibillion-dollar drought package.

“I don’t know if we’ll have any company,” Wilson said at a press reception. “We’ve got another potential ABC problem.”

ABC is Capitol Hill shorthand for “anybody but California,” a phrase that reflects resentment by many other lawmakers over the state’s power, given the size of its delegation, and the feeling that a disproportionate share of defense contracts and other federal money goes to California.

But Wilson’s influence with the Bush Administration and the effective network of Californians on key committees and in leadership posts gives the aid request a fighting chance of passage, perhaps as early as next month.

Rep. Vic Fazio (D-West Sacramento), who coordinated a successful effort to get more than $4 billion in earthquake relief for Northern California in 1989, was selected to lead the campaign for drought relief on the House Appropriations Committee.

Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), the third-ranking Republican in the House and also a member of the Appropriations panel, is expected to line up GOP support for emergency aid to the state.

While Fazio said it is still too early to say how much will be needed to help offset crop losses related to the drought, Rep. Leon E. Panetta (D-Carmel Valley) said it would be at least “a few billion dollars.”

“In my area alone, the loss amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars,” Panetta told reporters. “Many orchards are completely gone.”

The acting chairman of the House Interior Committee, Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), said he plans to move rapidly on legislation that would provide other relief, including the lifting of federal restrictions on allocating existing water supplies in drought areas.

Rep. Richard H. Lehman (D-Sanger) has introduced a bill that would authorize California farmers to sell excess water obtained from the Central Valley Project to municipal governments or other non-agricultural users. Under existing rules, water supplied by the project can be used for agricultural purposes only.

The measure is likely to be cleared for swift approval in the Interior panel, an aide to Miller said.

“People are going to take priority over crops,” Miller said. “In the long term, there’s a question of whether water should go to raise crops which are in surplus, and whether that’s in the best interests of the people of California.”

In another drought-related development, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-San Diego) introduced legislation to provide $250,000 toward a study by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation of how San Diego could reclaim water to increase drinking supplies.

But the big-ticket aid for California would come from a disaster aid program meant to give relief to farmers hard-hit by drought or any other natural catastrophe. It was authorized by the 1990 farm bill but never provided with any source of funding.

As a result, farmers in Georgia and Texas who lost crops because of drought last year received no federal benefits. Congressional aides said that if California gets substantial assistance, political reality would dictate that Georgia and Texas would have to be included.

“That’s always the problem with disaster assistance: You help out one part of the country and everybody else comes in with the cup out,” said a House staff aide familiar with the legislation.

Miller, asked about prospects for aid to California, said: “There’s no money to do anything, but with natural disasters we try to find a way to respond. It may have to be a more limited response than in the past.”

BACKGROUND

With California in the fifth year of a drought, the state has announced the suspension of all of its agricultural water deliveries. Federal officials, meanwhile, are expected to announce next week that their agricultural customers in California will receive only one-third of their normal water deliveries this year. The federal cutbacks would affect 20,000 farmers, mostly in the Central Valley.