Lake Pillsbury, behind Scott Dam. Photo: Isabella Vanderheiden.

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The Southern California water agency that is trying to acquire rights to Eel River water has been working behind the scenes to do so since at least December, despite never having had an open meeting on the subject.

What does it want with those rights? The plan right now, such as it is, appears to be to sell water to Russian River water users in Sonoma and Mendocino counties at a high premium, and to use the proceeds to fund its own operations.

All this is according to documents that local nonprofit Friends of the Eel received from the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District in response to a Public Records Act last week, all of which pertain to the district’s early interest in the Potter Valley Project.

“It’s important for Russian River water users to understand the threat to their water security that the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District is making,” said Alicia Hamann, executive director of Friends of the Eel, in a statement to the Outpost today.

The Potter Valley Project — which diverts water from the Eel River to the Russian River, originally to generate electricity — had been the subject of water disputes between residents of those watersheds for decades. But those disputes had largely been settled by the time PG&E, the project’s longtime owner, filed a plan to decommission the dams last year.

Immediately before that, interested parties on both rivers had agreed to a “two-basin solution,” hammered out by a working group convened by Congressman Jared Huffman, that would continue to send Eel River water south during the winter months, when there is a surplus, and to also fund restoration work along the Eel. The decrepit dams themselves would be removed, opening stretches of the upper Eel to fish passage.

This was all thrown into a bit of chaos on April 21 of this year, when U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins tweeted that Elsinore Valley — “a legitimate buyer who expressed strong interest in purchasing the project from PG&E” — was belatedly throwing its hat into the ring.

The district’s reasons for doing so were a little unclear at the time, but the documents received by Friends of the Eel give some hint as to what Elsinore Valley intends, and what led up to the secretary’s tweet.

The documents show that EVMWD director Darcy Burke and Greg Thomas — an elected member of the district’s board and the district’s general manager, respectively — were drafting letters to federal entities since at least December — several months after PG&E officially submitted its application to decommission the dams.

On Dec. 4, 2025, Burke sent Thomas a series of memos which appear to have been generated by AI. One such memo — linked here — makes the case that the water rights associated with the Potter Valley Project are worth between $500 million and $800 million, and that a “conservative estimate” of the sale of that water would result in revenues of $400 million per year — 50,000 acre-feet of water annually, sold to downstream users at $8,000 per acre-foot.

The two-basin agreement, by contrast, called for the project’s water rights, which would be assumed by the Round Valley Indian Tribes, to be leased to downstream water users for only a couple of million dollars per year.

A few days after Burke generated several such memos for Thomas, he sent a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the federal agency overseeing the dam decommissioning project, using much of the material generated by Burke to argue that FERC should not permit the decommissioning of the dams.

At some point, the mission pivoted from halting decommissioning to actively seeking to acquire the Potter Valley Project. The documents contain the minutes of a meeting held in Sacramento on January 16 between PG&E representatives and representatives of Elsinore Valley and an allied water district, the San Gorgonio Pass Water Agency. Burke attended for Elsinore Valley, as did the district’s assistant general manager, Ganesh Krishnamurthy.

The minutes – it’s unclear who wrote them — note that one of the “key takeaways” from the presentation is that “Elsinore has other water projects they are not necessarily providing water to their customers. They use these to fund purchasing water.”

“San Gorgonio and Elsinore discussed how they may have more capacity to take over due to their alliance with other agencies,” the minutes go on to state. “While they aren’t in the region they monetize other projects to purchase the water they need for their customers.”

In early March, Burke reached out to Curt Hébert, the former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission who is now a lawyer in private practice, to consult with him about questions she could ask the commission, which is still hearing PG&E’s decommissioning plan.

To date, the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District’s board has yet to discuss the Potter Valley Project in an open meeting, in front of its ratepayers. In the immediate aftermath of Rollins’ April tweet, a spokesperson said that the district was in the “initial, exploratory phase” of looking at the project. In an interview with the America Unwon podcast, Burke cast doubt on PG&E’s assessments of the dams’ condition — particularly the seismic studies that show them to be at serious earthquake risk — and said that they would have to order new studies.

Despite all that, the district seems to be going full speed ahead in its efforts to derail the decommissioning process, and instead to acquire the water rights for itself. Yesterday, Rollins tweeted that Elsinore Valley representatives were at a meeting she had convened with PG&E and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, head of the department to which FERC belongs.

In response, the “Two-Basin Partnership,” representing Sonoma and Mendocino county water agencies, the Round Valley Indian Tribes, California Trout and others, issued its own press release, and for the first time it started to tentatively sound the alarm about the potential of a Southern California water grab — once upon a time, one of the prime motivating fears of Northern California politics across the spectrum.

“We share the Secretary’s concern with maintaining water security in the region, but the USDA’s actions undermine our locally negotiated agreement that provides that security,” the release quoted Mari Rodin, the Ukiah City Council’s appointee to the Mendocino Inland Water and Power Commission, as saying. “It is incredibly important to us and our communities that control of resources stay in local hands.”