Scott Dam, with Lake Pillsbury behind it. | Photo: PG&E.

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Suddenly, the Trump administration has opinions on PG&E’s dam removal plans on the Eel River.

On Sunday evening, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins published a broadside on social media platform X in which she accused the investor-owned utility of “cutting water flows and pushing to tear down the Scott and Cape Horn Dams which have been lifelines for farmers and over 600,000 residents for more than a century.”

Of course, we already knew that various Russian River-adjacent farm bureaus and the Lake County government had made direct appeals to the Trump administration in hopes of salvaging the Potter Valley Project, an antiquated and expensive hydroelectric project that diverts water from the Eel to the Russian River. What we didn’t know was whether the administration would take the bait.

Now it has. Rollins’s tweet (or whatever X posts are called these days) blamed California Governor Gavin Newsom and the state legislature for “putting fish over people, destroying century old farms and leaving families vulnerable to more drought and wildfire.”

Reached via phone in Washington, D.C., this morning, Rep. Jared Huffman — who, unlike Newsom, was extensively involved in multi-agency negotiations to find a “two-basin solution” that satisfies competing regional interests — said Rollins’s take is misguided.

“If she’s truly concerned with what she says she cares about, which is the water supply to 600,000 people, [then] the worst thing you could possibly do is stand in the way of this [dam-removal project] moving forward,” Huffman said.

In July, PG&E filed an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to surrender its hydropower license and decommission the Potter Valley Project. In a statement emailed to the Outpost, PG&E spokesperson Paul Moreno said the motives for this were purely financial.

“The reason PG&E is seeking to decommission the Potter Valley Project is because it is non-economic and investing in dam upgrades [would] only add to the cost of operating it and would not make the project economic,” he said. 

Noting the utility’s long history of working with agricultural interests, Moreno’s statement went on to say that no one else was willing to take on the financial burden of maintaining the aging infrastructure, despite nearly a decade of searching.

“Ultimately no entity, through discussions with PG&E nor through the FERC regulatory process, came forward to own and operate Scott Dam,” the utility spokesperson said.

Huffman explained that the reason the water supply in Potter Valley has been “throttled down to virtually nothing” is because PG&E is not generating power at the plant,  so only a fraction of the normal diversions are moving through the Potter Valley Project.

“And the dam is so dilapidated that it can’t operate in the normal way,” Huffman added. “So the answer to water supply reliability is the new fish-friendly diversion that our coalition has supported and that PG&E is including in its decommissioning plan.”

The latest water diversion agreement, reached in July, is designed to meet the needs of communities in both the Eel and Russian River basins. It calls for PG&E’s water rights to be transferred to the Round Valley Indian Tribes, who will lease those rights back to a newly formed agency called the Eel-Russian Project Authority (ERPA). The agreement sets seasonal water diversion rules based on the natural flows and historic fish runs, with the bulk of diversions occurring in the winter and early spring.

PG&E’s decommissioning application includes a proposal from ERPA to construct a future water delivery system that uses existing PG&E facilities while the utility is decommissioning the Potter Valley Project. This proposal will allow for continued water delivery to the East Branch Russian River, according to PG&E’s spokesperson.

Huffman said the notion that farmers would be better off if the dams are somehow kept in place is nonsense.

“PG&E is never going to make power in that project again,” he said. “It’s over.”

He reiterated that the smartest way to ensure a reliable water supply to Potter Valley and the rest of the Russian River basin is to support the current plan, which involves construction of a fish-friendly diversion and investments in local storage and pump-back facilities.

“And if you try to blow all of this up, you’re just stuck in the status quo, which is not working for them,” Huffman said.

Alicia Hamann, executive director of the environmental nonprofit Friends of the Eel River, agreed with Huffman’s take and suggested that Rollins’s message was politically motivated.

“The Trump administration may be eager to hurt California environmentalists, but halting Eel River dam removal threatens the reliability of the Russian River’s future water supply as much as Eel River salmon and steelhead,” she said in an emailed statement.

Hamann rejected the assertion that dam removal puts fish over people, noting that people benefit from healthy ecosystems, relying on fish for healthy cultures, diets and economies.

“This is not a story of fish versus people but rather a hard-earned agreement between people representing diverse interests,” she said. “The federal government’s attempts to intervene in this deal that water users and other stakeholders have spent years negotiating will harm farmers when Scott Dam inevitably fails.”

In her tweet, Rollins said she and her department are working with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and others “to deliver real solutions to secure Potter Valley’s water supply.”

“I hope what she means by that is supporting the raising of Coyote Dam at Lake Mendocino, which is something I’ve been pushing,” Huffman said. 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is currently working with the Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission and the Lytton Rancheria to explore the prospect of raising Coyote Dam as a means of boosting the water supply that supports regional agriculture and recreation.

If those are the “real solutions” that Rollins is referring to, then Huffman is all for it.

“If they’re serious … that would enable us to use the new fish-friendly diversion optimally,” he said. “That would help everyone.”

With major structural problems and seismic risks at Scott Dam, the price tag of resurrecting the Potter Valley Project would be well over a billion dollars, according to Huffman, who agreed that the Trump administration seems intent on “sticking it to California” at every turn.

“No one, even in the most ideological MAGA fever dream, is stupid enough to take on a project that loses that kind of money and has that kind of massive liability,” he said.

Federal interference in this long-negotiated multi-party agreement can certainly gum up the works and cause delays in bringing the dams down, but Huffman doesn’t believe that the Trump administration can stop it altogether.

“In fact, I’m very confident they cannot,” he said. “When you have the ability to order federal agencies to do things for purely political reasons, you can definitely slow things down. 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.”

The Outpost reached out to the U.S. Department of Agriculture seeking more details on Rollins’s statement and the agency’s plans but did not hear back by publication time. We also emailed both the Sonoma County Water Agency and the Mendocino County government to get their takes but likewise did not hear back by this afternoon.

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