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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And I am joined by my friends, my best friends at Friends of the Eel River, Alicia Hamann and Scott Greacen. Welcome to the show, folks.

HAMANN:

Hey, Tom, thanks for having us.

WHEELER:

So I imagine you guys have been kind of stressed and I imagine that your inbox has been blowing up because there is some news related to Eel River dam removal, and you two are my Eel River dam removal experts. The Eel River dam removal experts, let's say.

So we're going to, we're going to talk about this news, a, a potential buyer for the Eel River dams, if that's even possible, the work of the Trump administration to intervene and mess everything up and put sand in the gears, whatever, we'll, we'll, we'll understand better at the end of this episode. So we're talking about Eel River dams, they are part of this larger thing called the Potter Valley Project. We do this every single episode that we talk about Eel River dams, but Alicia, what is the Potter Valley Project? How does it all work? What are we talking about here when we're talking about Eel River dams?

ALICIA HAMANN:

Yeah, so the Potter Valley Project is a failed hydroelectric project owned by PG&E in the headwaters of the Eel River. But importantly, it actually straddles two watersheds. So on the Eel River side, there are two dams and a diversion tunnel that goes through the ridgeline between the Eel and the Russian River. So the two dams store water on the Eel River side and then divert it out of the Eel into the Russian River where there's a powerhouse at the top end of the east branch of the Russian River. That powerhouse used to generate a teeny tiny amount of electricity at a significant financial loss. But now it generates no electricity at all, which is only one of the ways that this project has really failed and and is causing a lot of a lot of headache for PG&E and is the reason why they're working quickly to to surrender their license and get out from under this significant liability.

I'm not going to go into detail today on all the other reasons why it is dangerous and harmful to the ecosystem and has failed in a number of ways and is at risk of failing even worse, but you can find all of that information at eelriver.org.

WHEELER:

OK, so because it involves an interbasin transfer of water from the Eel River watershed to the Russian River watershed, I imagine that there are some folks who want to maintain flows as they existed and want to maintain this infrastructure, though it might be fish killing and at risk of seismic collapse. And among these people might be Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins.

HAMANN:

Before we get to her, I just want to say that what's really remarkable about the Potter Valley Project and where we are at in this process of removing the Eel River dams is that largely all of the stakeholders affected by this project agree that it is time to remove these dams and switch to modern diversion infrastructure that's gonna be more reliable for the folks on the Russian River side.

So right now, PG&E is in the midst of their license surrender process, and that's a process that they go through with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC. And on a parallel but separate track, there are stakeholders in both river basins who've come up with a deal to support dam removal and pursue what they're calling the New Eel Russian Facility, or NERF, which is a dam-free diversion that's going to be in place once the dams are removed. So we see a lot of this like, oh, it's Eel River versus Russian River, or it's Ag versus Fish, or People versus Fish. But in reality, everyone has come together to agree on the current moment. Yes, there are still folks who are opposing dam removal for other reasons, but largely, the folks who are benefiting from this project or harmed by this project, for the most part, agree that it's time to get rid of it.

And that brings us to Secretary Rollins.

WHEELER:

Well, so I mean, this reflects the Trump administration generally, which is, you have serious people who are working to understand the world's problems, to collaborate, to come toward solutions, and then you have the Trump administration, who are deeply unserious, and they listen to the fringe radical elements that have refused to sit down at the table, have refused to engage in the processes, and have had a little temper tantrums to this point, and so the like, loudest voices, maybe not even the loudest voices, the most extreme voices, the most conservative voices, the most outrageous voices are being amplified by the Trump administration here.

Okay, so why is Brooke Rollins, who is Brooke Rollins, and why is she, why does she care?

SCOTT GREACEN:

Brooke Rollins is now the Secretary of Agriculture. She is, as you say, a hardcore MAGA type who was in the interregnum during the Biden years, allied with Stephen Miller in a weird little pact that was making plans for our collective future. But what she has done here is assert, as you say, that the plan by PG&E to decommission and remove the Eel River dams is essentially an attack on agriculture, on, as she puts it, farmers and ranchers. And what she's announced recently is that she's found a buyer in the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, which is located in Riverside County on the outskirts of Los Angeles, about 600 miles from the Eel River and the Potter Valley Project.

WHEELER:

So this is confusing to me, are the Eel River dams for sale?

GREACEN:

I mean, PG&E has responded by saying, well, of course, we'd sell them if somebody offered us a lot of money. And the truth is, they're not worth anything. What they are is a liability. So the buyer of the structures, such as they are, would be buying a lot of liability and debt and basically the responsibility of dealing with these things.

But what is not for sale, but Rollins seems to think is for sale, what cannot be transferred is the license, the hydroelectric license that PG&E is operating under before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC. Because of the way FERC's rules work, PG&E put the project up for sale years ago when it had decided it could no longer relicense the project. It then offered it for sale. Nobody came forward. And in the course of that process, the people who really, really, really wanted to keep the project going took a good hard look at it and decided it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, half a billion probably, to repair it, relicense it, and tens of millions of dollars a year to operate. PG&E told us that it was costing them $20 in operations costs for every dollar they made in hydroelectric sales when it was still operating to produce power. It's not a viable operation.

So that's why even the farmers and ranchers decided that the best plan here is to remove the obsolete infrastructure and build new infrastructure that'll be more resilient, lower impact, and that's structured around a deal that awards this key water right PG&E now holds to the Round Valley Indian Tribes. So that's, to answer your question, the other part of this puzzle. Is the project for sale? No, not really. Could you still buy the dams? Sure, why would you? But what's really valuable here is that water right, the pre-1914 water right to divert water from the Eel River. And again, the plan that everybody has agreed to here would transfer that water right to the Round Valley Indian Tribes, to whom it rightfully belongs, I might say.

HAMANN:

If I could just note here, one of the more insulting components of this whole scheme by the Trump administration is this element of stealing this opportunity for restorative justice from the Round Valley Indian tribes. Their water has already been stolen for a century, right? Everyone has come together to form this plan to return some amount of power to the tribes. The Trump administration is coming in at the last minute to try and sweep that away. And I think that we should all take a really hard look at the larger value system that's behind a decision like that.

GREACEN:

So having said all that, if in theory they could buy the water, the water right, there's no connection right now between the Eel River or the Russian River and the Central Valley Project. There's no way to convey water from the Eel River down to Southern California at the moment. And that's both part of the reason we think this is wildly infeasible and part of the reason we're really quite concerned about it. Because Southern California interests have a long history of trying to take all the water from Northern California because they think it's getting wasted, frankly.

HAMANN:

Well, and let's be realistic. I think that Southern California has been successful in many of their endeavors to take water from the North. That's why they're able to have this booming population in such an arid region down there.

GREACEN:

That's why there is a Central Valley project. That's why there's the State Water Project. That's what they do. That's why Mono Lake is the story it is because Los Angeles Department of Water and Power took the water that fed the lake, yeah. It's not a new story. And on the Eel, the last big round of this fight was when Governor Ronald Reagan killed the Dos Rios Dam that would have flooded Covelo and put an end to the Round Valley Indian Tribes' reservation.

So these aren't new fights, but they keep getting renewed periodically. And with the construction underway of Sites Reservoir and a couple of other major pieces of movement, I think on the big water agenda, the Southern California interests are trying to push some more. So I think we have reason to be concerned.

HAMANN:

Let Tom come in and ask a question so he doesn't ...

WHEELER:

Well, so I was going to ask, because it is both serious and infeasible, right? So there's like a duality to this. And I think that we've had comment now from this water district about their proposal, and it sort of sounded to me as if Brooke Rollins oversold the water district's interest or the seriousness in which they were considering this proposal. Do you have any reflections on the reporting, I think it was from the Lost Coast Outpost, that got in contact with a spokesperson for the water district?

HAMANN:

You know, I will say that we're looking into how serious the Water District is about this interest that they have in in the Potter Valley Project. As far as we can tell, there has been no agendized discussion. There's been no directives to staff. The the two board members that traveled up to the Potter Valley Project to visit it and attended a Potter Valley Irrigation District board meeting. Now, whether their fellow board members even knew that they did that until they reported about it in their minutes last month is unclear. But what is clear is that there have been some behind the scenes conversations, and this is a public agency, so we are definitely looking to shed light on what kinds of backdoor conversations have been happening.

WHEELER:

Okay, so we have a proposal that's infeasible because you can't really buy the Potter Valley Project. It doesn't have connections to the Central Valley Project, although that hasn't stopped previous water projects from attempting to bring water from north to south. And we went into this a little bit, the connection to the Round Valley Tribe. Let's talk a little bit more about Round Valley Tribe and the impact to tribal water rights. So the Round Valley Tribe was going to inherit the water rights from this project. What would that functionally mean for the tribe and what would be taken away from the tribe?

HAMANN:

So part of the Water Diversion Agreement includes transferring PG&E's senior water rights. So these are pre-1914 water rights, which means that they're extremely valuable or they're not subject to the same kinds of regulations as newer water rights. Those water rights would be transferred to the tribes. They would then basically own control over the water and they would be leasing it back to the water users in the Russian River Valley for a rate of about a million dollars a year. Now there's been some discussion about whether that's an appropriate amount for the amount of water that's being diverted. It's actually quite low, but we understand that there was a great deal of negotiation that went into that figure.

But I do want to talk a little bit about the legal protections at place here. Like what kinds of legal protections do we have against connecting the Eel to the state water project? Or what does it look like to establish a new FERC license?

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. We're talking about the threat to Eel River Dam removal from the Trump administration and a new proposal to potentially buy the Eel River Dams, as crazy as that sounds.

HAMANN:

Scott do you want to chime in on some of the legal situation here?

GREACEN:

This is kind of a parallel to the "there's no physical connection" argument, that right now, there are a bunch of laws that would forbid doing what Elsinore Valley seems to want to do. Principally, there's the Endangered Species Act and the California Endangered Species Act, both of which say you can't keep operating the Potter Valley Project the way they did in the mid-20th century, and you probably can't keep operating it the way you are right now. The project is already out from under the Incidental Take Permits it had for a while, but no longer covered. The Clean Water Act would be a problem. The State Water Resources Control Board in California is what rules on proposed transfers of water rights, including what's called changes in place of use, which this would definitely be, because you're using it in Elsinore Valley, not the Russian River.

So the State Water Board would weigh in on that and its potential impacts. And as you guys have referenced, out-of-basin transfers are basically banned in California in general. If somebody went to set this kind of project up today, everybody would say, no, can't do that. This is basically grandfathered in. But the point here, again, is that for all the laws that stand against this, part of the point here on the part of the proponents, the Trump administration, is that they'd prefer to get rid of those laws, and they'll ignore them where they can't. So again, I'm afraid we have to take this fairly seriously.

WHEELER:

Okay, so we've talked about the impact around Valley. What about some other folks in the Russian River, their water users that might be interested in a new Eel River facility? Alicia, can you talk to me about those?

HAMANN:

Yeah, well, so not only would an entity like Lake Elsinore taking over this project take away local ownership of the water rights from the tribes, but it would also take away local control of the water system from the water users. And I'm going to say something really weird that I could never have imagined a reality where I would say this, but we here at Friends of the Eel River stand with our friends in the Potter Valley Irrigation District in wanting to see the control over water supply stay local. There is no reality in which a water district from LA is going to own this project, control the water, and provide it to irrigators in Potter Valley at a lower rate than their own irrigation district, if they provide them with water at all through the project, right?

So the folks who actually do rely on those diversions, who for 100 years now have been getting this super cheap, super abundant water source and have built a unique agricultural economy around it, they really stand to lose a lot from this proposal. And I think they should be really concerned about what it means and frankly, really upset about this threat to the millions of dollars that they've invested in researching water storage options and building a new joint powers authority and negotiating for years and years and years to come to this place that we're at now where we have a plan for the future. This is just not right and not going to be helpful whatsoever for those local farmers up here who actually do depend on that water.

GREACEN:

I just want to underscore what Alicia is saying by talking a little bit about what we're hearing now from the Mendocino Inland Water and Power Commission. We spent many, many years at the start of this process arguing with the Inland Water and Power Commission, who wanted desperately to keep the dams. They finally agreed to the Two Basin Solution, the Water Diversion Agreement. And today, their key agenda is building that trans-basin diversion and building more water storage. And they're really concerned that their neighbors are still freaking out about dam removal.

They said: It is not feasible to take over Scott Dam. Our mission is water reliability. We have to do what we can control, and that means building more storage and pursuing funding to raise Coyote Dam and the Lake Mendocino Reservoir so they'll have a place to put some of the water that comes over in the new diversion. And frankly, you know, the outbreak of sanity is really wonderful to see, and it's heartening. But again, the Trump administration is ignoring all this good work and constructive effort to just try to blow the whole deal up because they think Gavin Newsom likes it.

HAMANN:

Yeah, I mean, let's not forget that one of the objectives of this administration is just to stick it to Californians, to environmentalists, to anybody who's at all woke in any way. So if that like destroys a bunch of farms along the way, tough. Mention the poor steelhead, right?

WHEELER:

Ironic that Brooke Rollins' tweet about this was in support of the ranchers and farmers when the actual ranchers and farmers in Mendocino County seem now on board with the new Eel River facility and a future of wet weather, water diversion.

So we have a great congressperson, Jared Huffman, who has been involved and has been trying to find a solution for the Potter Valley project for over a decade. I imagine that he probably is concerned about this too. Where is Congressman Huffman on this new threat?

GREACEN:

We've heard directly from Jared, and he is not happy, put it that way. And so we saw some evidence of this already today in a story in the San Francisco Chronicle in which Congressman Huffman announces that he's opening an inquiry into the Trump administration's effort to hijack dam removal on the Eel River. And this is consequential because Jared's not just a congressman, he's also the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee. And what ranking member means is that he's the senior Democrat on the panel. Now, of course, under House rules with Republican domination, they don't have a lot of power. But come November, it's quite likely that Jared Huffman is gonna be the chairman of the Natural Resources Committee with power to get some answers from Secretary Rollins about what exactly they're planning and how they intend to deal with these legal, environmental, and economic water issues.

As we've sketched out here, there are matters of grave consequence for the communities of Northern California here. And we probably haven't emphasized enough, being an environmental show, that the fate of steelhead and Chinook salmon in the Eel River, among other species, really does hang in the balance. There's real potential if we don't get the two-basin solution implemented and dam removal implemented in the next decade or so, that we see those species winking out at the top of the Eel, if the current infrastructure stays in place and fails as it is failing. So that's what's driving our deep concern here, is potential for really serious lasting harm.

WHEELER:

So prior to this new threat from the Trump administration, can you remind me where we were on Potter Valley Project, dam removal, where we were before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and how might this affect current ongoing processes? Yeah.

HAMANN:

So, you know, I said at the top of the half hour that PG&E submitted their license surrender application to FERC last year. There was a robust comment period. Thank you to the literally hundreds and hundreds of people who submitted comments in support of dam removal. That was heartening to see and helpful to communicate that to FERC, that there is broad public support, that dam removal serves the public interest. And now we were always going to be in kind of a quiet time where there's a lot of behind-the-scenes work. PG&E is going to spend the next roughly two years developing management plans and restoration plans. They've started consulting with tribes for cultural resource studies. There's just a lot of work going on to do some additional studies, understand the composition of the sediment in the reservoirs, how it's going to move throughout the watershed once the dams are removed.

PG&E is also going to be securing a clean water permit from the state of California. So there's a lot of like behind the scenes things going on, but something that is upfront and center that we need to address now is getting Lake Elsinore to back off on trying to steal this water, right? So what we want people to do right now is go to eelriver.org, take a look at our action alert. We last was, I'm confused about my timelines right now, but last week, I think it was, we rallied about a dozen people to call into the water district's board meeting and tell them why taking over this project is a terrible investment for their constituents and also why the North Coast stakeholders have determined and agreed that the dams need to be removed and we have a plan and thank you very much, we don't need your involvement. We need to be doing more of that. We need to keep up the pressure to make them really, really uncomfortable coming into our backyard and screwing with our plans.

So there's an action alert on our website. Their board meetings, for now at least, are available by Zoom. They're the second and fourth Thursday every month at 4 p.m. So the next one coming up is May 14th, then May 28th, then June 11th, et cetera, et cetera. And we want you all to be on those calls every single board meeting, putting on the pressure.

If you wanna talk to us in person about this, we are going to be at the May Day protest at the Eureka Courthouse, handing out flyers, getting people engaged.

WHEELER:

That's after the show.

HAMANN:

Oh, right, I'm sorry. Well, hopefully you saw us there. Hopefully you saw us there. The next chance to connect with us, we'll be at our monthly solidarity gathering, which is the second Monday every month at Humbrews from five to 7 p.m. We're gonna be featuring the North Coast Growers Association this coming month. But of course, we will also be talking about this. And you can always find this information, eelriver.org, or any of our social platforms.

WHEELER:

All right, well. Who's Todd Lands?

HAMANN:

That's a great question, Tom. We'll close this out with a fun little exploration into local politics and why you shouldn't sell out your region. Todd Lands is running for Sonoma County Supervisor, and he is a key player here in connecting the Trump administration to this project. In fact, he's been really, yeah, I don't know how else to put it other than he's been a key player. He has been a part of many of the conversations here. We don't know all the details yet. We are doing our own research, as I understand Congressman Huffman is as well. We'll be understanding really his role and what kinds of conversations he's been involved in. But for those of you who are sports people and are loyal to your regional teams, Todd Lands wants to sell your water to Dodgers fans. So if that doesn't get you up in arms, I don't know what will.

WHEELER:

All right, that's a creative way to get sports people involved in this. Do you have any friends? Are there folks within the Trump world that are useful, that are helpful, that you can speak to or who have been speaking on Eel River issues? I ask just because in reflection, an issue that we've had at EPIC was barred owl removal, where we ended up working together with sportsmen, with the timber industry to talk to the Trump administration because we had no way to get into them. And it was a strange relationship for us to have, but it was one where we had common alignment. Are the farmers who voted for Trump in Mendocino and Sonoma counties, are they also now going to the Trump administration saying, hey, it would really be great if Brooke Rollins were to back off a bit?

HAMANN:

I mean, that's a great question. What I will say is that our Free the Eel Coalition includes fishermen, commercial and recreational. It includes whitewater enthusiasts, municipalities, state and federal agency representatives, tribes, NGOs. And then there's our allies who are working directly with these water agencies and the farmers and ranchers that they represent. We're all working toward the same thing together. And whether any of them have a side channel to anyone in the Trump administration that would be helpful, I couldn't answer, but I certainly hope that if they do have that connection, they're working it right now.

WHEELER:

Okay, well, friends, I'm sure glad that Friends of the Eel River exists, because when the news broke, I just immediately thought, well, thank God, Scott and Alicia are so competent that they're going to be on top of this, and that I'm sure this will make great radio fodder in the future. And lo and behold, Scott and Alicia were on top of it, and it did make great radio fodder, so.

HAMANN:

I appreciate that, Tom, but I just wanna really underscore that this is not just Scott and Alicia. There really is a broad coalition. The Round Valley Indian tribes are leading some of the really important messaging and a lot of the critical behind the scenes work. So we are friends of the Eel River and we like to bring people together to do big, important, meaningful things, but it's definitely not just us. It takes a broad coalition.

WHEELER:

Absolutely. Well, thank you both. And go to eelriver.org to always find out more information about Eel River dam removal, the health of the Eel River, all things Eel River at eelriver.org. Thank you to my friends Alicia Hamann and Scott Greacen for joining the show. All right. And join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.