The going rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is about $2,500 a month. That’s the same amount the city pays to use eight miles of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park as a reservoir.

The $30,000 annual fee was set by federal law in 1913 and has not been changed since. But now, as the federal government struggles with budget problems, a Central Valley congressman is pushing to increase the city’s Hetch Hetchy rent by a thousandfold, to $34 million a year.

Representative Devin Nunes, a Republican from Tulare, said the current low rent amounts to a federal subsidy for San Francisco’s water and electricity supply and is unfair to farmers in his heavily agricultural district, whose water supply is diminished. He proposed to Congress’s Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction that the city be made to pay a fee comparable to what the government sought to charge Southern California Edison to operate a reservoir in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.

The extra money would be a drip in the country’s deep financial hole, but it would drive up the city’s municipal power costs and reverberate through the water bills of 2.5 million Bay Area residents.