Scott Dam at Lake Pillsbury. Photo: PG&E.

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UPDATE:

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This morning, Brooke Rollins, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, tweeted that a potential buyer has expressed interest in taking over the two dams near the headwaters of the Eel River, in Mendocino and Lake Counties.

That buyer is the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, which serves around 160,000 residential and commercial users in western Riverside County.

It’s not yet clear how serious the district is, or why it wants to assume water and power operations far from the customers it serves, but in her tweet Rollins celebrated the fact that a buyer could potentially disrupt PG&E’s efforts to abandon the dam system, which hasn’t produced power in many years and has been massively inefficient for many more.

In concert with PG&E’s abandonment efforts, environmentalists, local governments and water districts in the Russian River Basin, which receives diverted water from the dams, have hammered out a future agreement whereby water would continue to flow south after the dams are removed, in exchange for funding to restore habitat along the river.

In the past, the government of Lake County and agricultural interests in Potter Valley have appealed to the Trump administration to kill the deal. PG&E’s plan to decommission the dams is currently before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Minutes from the March 26 meeting of the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District Board of Directors show that two of its members — both members of its “Water Supply Ad Hoc Subcommittee” — had recently traveled to a meeting of the Potter Valley Irrigation District, though the minutes do not reflect what was discussed there. 

The Outpost has a call in to Elsinore, and we’ll update when we hear back. Also, we are promised statements from Friends of the Eel and PG&E soon.

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