FRESNO, Calif. -- California's second-largest storage reservoir will end this year with the lowest amount of water the state has seen in more than 30 years, Department of Water Resources director Lester Snow said Monday.

Snow spoke at a congressional hearing on California's drought in Fresno, where farmers, climate change experts and area politicians testified about the financial impacts wrought by the water shortage.

State officials are already preparing for another year of drought in 2009, prompted by low storage levels, court-ordered cutbacks, increasing demand for water and forecasts of another dry winter, Snow told the House Subcommittee on Water and Power.

Lake Shasta -- the state's largest reservoir -- is at just 48 percent of capacity, department officials said.

Numerous farmers told the legislators that another year of tight water supplies could spell economic disaster for the fertile San Joaquin Valley.

The unemployment rate in Mendota, an agricultural town about 35 miles west of Fresno, is already 23 percent, said Mayor Robert Silva.

The subcommittee plans to use the testimony to inform the federal government's response to the water shortage, said its chair Rep. Grace Napolitano, D-Calif.

Representatives from environmental and fishermen's organizations, as well as Native American tribes, were not called to testify.