Cape Horn Dam. Photo: PG&E.

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The two broken dams on the Upper Eel River found a powerful champion this morning, after the United States Department of Agriculture filed a motion to intervene in Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proceedings that would see them removed.

The department’s filings today follow Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins’s letter to the editor published in the Mendocino Voice last week, in which Rollins told Potter Valley farming interests that they were “not alone in this righteous fight, which strikes at the very heart of our freedoms.”

The dams — together known as the “Potter Valley Project,” and owned by Pacific Gas and Electric — have been unable to generate power for many years, which is the purpose they were built for a century ago.

In the last few years, Rep. Jared Huffman has led efforts to form a compromise “two-basin solution” that would allow for continued diversion of water from the Eel to the Russian River, supporting agriculture and population in Mendocino and Sonoma counties.

When that was completed — and after local tribes, environmental organizations, Humboldt County and the principal water agencies in both Mendocino and Sonoma all signed on — PG&E officially filed a decommissioning plan with FERC in July 2025. 

But chapters of the Farm Bureau in communities along the Russian River have stood in dissent, and have communicated their displeasure to the Trump Administration — as has the government of Lake County, which is home to Lake Pillsbury, the reservoir behind one of the dams.

Now, with the official intervention of the Department of Agriculture, it appears their pleas have been heard. Writing for the department, Tucker A. Stewart, senior advisor to Secretary Rollins, argues on a number of fronts that FERC should deny PG&E’s application to remove the dams, at least in its current form.

Though the department’s principal concern appears to be protecting farmers and ranchers, especially those in the Potter Valley region. But it also makes a number of arguments about the decommissioning plan’s effects on firefighting, recreational opportunities and reforestation. (Read the full letter here.)

Stewart concludes:

It is abundantly clear that PG&E’s application fails to consider appropriately the elimination of water supply to local communities without viable alternatives; the negative impact that removal will have on downstream communities and agricultural producers; and the diminished capacity for wildland firefighting in one of the most fire-prone regions of the country. Unless and until PG&E addresses the aforementioned issues included in these comments, the Department respectfully requests that the Commission reject PG&E’s application to surrender its FERC license for Potter Valley Project dam because of the profoundly negative and irreversible impact on local farmers, ranchers, agricultural producers, communities, and USDA equities.

Reached this afternoon, Scott Greacen, conservation director for Friends of the Eel, told the Outpost that the department’s ask of FERC appears to be to force PG&E to continue to maintain the dams — an option he argued was forbidden under federal law.

“The Federal Power Act expressly forecloses that at as an option,” Greacen said.

Back in September, when Rollins first started tweeting about the Potter Valley Project, Rep. Huffman, in an interview with the Outpost, argued that political intervention in the proceedings would only harm the people the administration was attempting to help.

“When you have the ability to order federal agencies to do things for purely political reasons, you can definitely slow things down,” Huffman said. “That’s my sense of what this means. And, you know, who’s hurt the most by that? Ironically, it’s the people in Potter Valley and in the Russian River Basin, because it delays the water supply solution that is the only way their needs are going to be met.”

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