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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 we are going to go splashing in the waters of the Eel River with the best friend of the Eel River, Alicia Hamann, Executive Director of Friends of the Eel River. Hey, Alicia.

ALICIA HAMANN:

Hey, Tom. Hey, everyone.

WHEELER:

All right, so this is an Eel River-focused show and there's been a couple of news items about the Eel River in the last week or two that we should quickly go through before we dive into the meat of Eel River dam removal, where we're at, the threats and opportunities and so forth. So let's go to the waters of the Eel. I saw recently that a dog died because of algae poisoning from the Eel River. Do you wanna talk about this common summer occurrence of algae in the Eel and what folks should be doing about it?

HAMANN:

Yeah, I mean, I'll start off with saying just the Eel is such a special place that so many people love, but like many of the rivers in our community, it also poses inherent dangers. And my heart goes out to the folks who lost their beloved dog. Like you said, it happens just about every year. So this is the time of year when flows in the river are getting low and temperatures are getting warm and there's a lot more algae production. And what we have in the Eel is a particular type of cyanobacteria that carries neurotoxins that can be fatal. So by this point in the year, keep your dogs out of the river, keep your little kids out of the river too. Dogs will often tromp through the mats of algae and then lick their fur afterwards. That's I think a kind of common way that they'll ingest that algae. And kids, I mean, anyone with kids knows they put anything and everything in their mouth. So it's a good time of the year to be out at the coast or elsewhere where you're not going to be encountering those kinds of dangers.

And I will say tips for knowing when that time of year has come, the county and the health department and the water board usually do a pretty good job of noticing, putting up notices at river access points once algae has been detected and confirmed to be the dangerous kind, but that takes a while. And so if you're going to the river and you see those floating mats of algae or you see big accumulations of it, just don't go in in those areas. It's really not worth the risk. So yeah, please, please stay safe out there, folks. And remember, if you're living in a community alongside the river where you're using the water in the river for your domestic supply, every little bit that you can conserve, especially during the wintertime, really helps to keep flows flowing later in the year when things start to get dry and warm like this.

WHEELER:

All right, so keep the dogs out, keep the kids out, find somewhere else to go. I think the Smith River, if you're willing to make a little bit of a drive from Humboldt County, continues to be pretty nice at this point of the year for swimming. So you gotta get your river fixed. There are ways to do it. Other things going on in the Eel.

HAMANN:

I was just going to say, you know, one thing you can do in the Eel right now that doesn't involve necessarily getting into the river is fishing for pike minnow.

WHEELER:

I was just going to make that transition. Yeah, let's talk about pike minnow. So it's a fish and it shouldn't be in the Eel River, yeah?

HAMANN:

That's right, yeah, the Sacramento pike minnow is invasive in the Eel, and a friend of mine who previously worked for the Wiyot tribe and is a lover of all things fishy was always reminding me that pike minnow have their place in the right watershed, right? There is a place that they are native to and appreciated there, so we don't need to spend time hating on them, but they are not right for the Eel, and they both compete with our native fish for habitat and food, and they also predate on our native fish. It's not uncommon when someone catches a pretty large-sized pike minnow to find juvenile steelhead or salmon in that pike minnow's belly. So right now, our friends over at Trib Research in partnership with Caltrout are hosting the Pike Minnow Derby. It runs through the end of August, and you can go to Trib Research's website, which is tribresearch.org, to find the rules for participating in this derby. You do need to follow all CDFW fishing guidelines, use those barbless hooks, don't use live bait, and then there's particular parts of the river where you're supposed to be doing the fishing, but yeah, you can win some prizes, and you can help get those invasive fish out of the river.

WHEELER:

And it being an invasive fish, I don't imagine there are any bag limits on the number you can take. Alicia, is pike minnow good eating? Can you eat a pike?

HAMANN:

I would suggest that they would best be utilized as fertilizer. That being said, one of the rules is that you're not supposed to, I can't remember the official terminology that CDFW uses, but basically you're not supposed to like waste the body of the fish. Don't leave carcasses on the riverbank, be respectful, clean up your mess, and take that fish somewhere where it can be turned up for fertilizer. You could consider reaching out to the Wiyot tribe or to the folks at Trib Research to see if they have suggestions for what to do with the fish. I know that in the past there have been times where there have been collection sites and they've taken them to folks who are putting those fish bodies to good use. And Trib Research does have a recipe for like pike minnow fish cakes or something if you wanted to experiment with some new cuisine.

WHEELER:

Yeah, so a quick Google search says that they're considered a trash fish because of their many small pin bones, but they are edible. And if you go online, you can find recipes for pike minnow. So there you go, waste not want not go catch some pike minnow, put them in your freezer and then have some like the most ethically sourced protein you can possibly imagine. Very true. All right, what else is going on in the Eel River these days? I feel like there was one more thing that...

HAMANN:

Yeah, so the last thing that we're pretty excited to share about is the Eel River Native Plant Network. It's a new initiative that we've just launched, but it has been years in the making. And like briefly, the Eel River Native Plant Network is all about connecting with tribal nations and restoration nonprofits and commercial nurseries and various different agencies that work with native plants all to collaborate on ways that we can increase regional production of native plant materials. It turns out that hardly anyone is producing native plants at scale within the Eel River Basin. And thinking about the massive restoration project that we have ahead of us, hopefully within the next few years when PG&E starts removing those dams, we really need to get moving on collecting and amplifying seeds to be used to revegetate those reservoirs.

The Yurok tribes spent about five years collecting and growing and sourcing, what are they? I think they ended up using 160,000 pounds of seed, but the footprint of the reservoirs on the Eel River is actually a bit larger than the footprint of the reservoir on the Klamath, the reservoirs on the Klamath. A consultant that's been working with us has done some like preliminary estimates and his high-end estimate of how many pounds of seed we might need is about 300,000. We are working to do what we can to increase regional production of native seeds so that we can maybe get some boost to our local economy, convince PG&E to buy some of the seed from local producers or local tribes. And it's a project we're just really excited about. We actually have a pretty new website for the project, eelrivernativeplantnetwork.org.

You can check it out there, read some of our reports. So we just had our very first in-person meeting on June 18th. And then we've got another meeting coming up in Ukiah later this fall in September.

WHEELER:

All right, well, that's really exciting. I remember after the Klamath Dam removal, just the beautiful blossoms in that first growing season afterwards, because of the hard work that the Yurok Tribe and others put into native re-vegetation. And I'm excited, I'm so excited to see a free-running Eel River with native plants and all the restoration activities that will go into it. So thank you to Friends of the Eel River and others in this network for your work. It's also optimistic too, or maybe it's not optimistic, but it is a reminder that these dams are coming out and that there is some opposition to dam removal, but the crystal ball of the future shows a free-running Eel River.

And so that's what I hope we can dedicate the rest of the show to, is where we are in this dam removal process, the threat from the Lake Elsinore Water District and recent rulings from FERC on whether they can intervene as a late intervener, what the heck that means, and then also what this extension of a comment period might mean. So let's go back to the very beginning and pretend that no one knows anything about the Eel River and let's talk about the Potter Valley Project and why we need to get the dams out that are part of the Potter Valley Project. Go for it.

HAMANN:

Yeah, well, I'll just start by saying, note for future podcasts, we have got to find a way to poll our audience and find out, do people need to keep hearing this background? But I'm happy to give it, happy to give it. So on the Eel River, there are two dams and a diversion that takes water out of the Eel and sends it into the Russian River. Collectively, this is called the Potter Valley Project and it's owned by PG&E. The whole project is about, what year is it? About 120 years old at this point. And it is a licensed as a hydroelectric facility, but it hasn't produced any electricity for five years now. And even when it did produce electricity, from about 2000 to 2021, each year it made up about a quarter of 1% of PG&E's entire hydropower portfolio. So it made a teeny, teeny, tiny bit of electricity, but the water that it diverted did grow to become really important to the communities that received it in an otherwise very dry, arid region where they had practiced dry farming for generations before that.

So why are those dams harmful to the ecosystem? Well, first, what matters most to Friends of the Eel River is that they harm our native fish. They block access to 280 miles of what turns out to be some of the best steelhead spawning habitat in the entire basin. They also lead to the accumulation of methylated mercury in the aquatic organisms living in the reservoir. Folks, if you're out there fishing, don't ever eat anything that you catch in Lake Pillsbury Reservoir. Downstream, the upper basin is starved of the sediment and rocks and gravels that are necessary to create diverse and useful habitat for native fish. It also warms the water temperature downstream from the dams, and it helps those invasive pike minnow that we were talking about earlier. They were actually originally introduced in the Lake Pillsbury Reservoir, which is created by Scott Dam.

So speaking of Scott Dam, that's the larger of the two dams that are a part of this project. There are some real serious safety issues with Scott Dam. Not only is it a hundred years old, but there is sedimentation that has filled the reservoir behind it, and it threatens to block the only water release. So if that ever happens, no water is leaving that dam unless it's completely full and toppling over the top. Scott Dam also sits on a major earthquake fault, the Bartlett Springs Fault. And as we have learned more and more about this, regulators and PG&E themselves have become more and more concerned about the risks that they are responsible for in continuing to own this project. Scott Dam is rated as a high hazard facility because if it fails when the reservoir is full, it's going to cause fatalities downstream.

So PG&E has wisely decided that this project that makes them no money, the reservoir that can never be fully emptied or fully filled, and that causes potentially fatal risk, should just be gotten rid of already at this point.

WHEELER:

And so, they need to receive permission from FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, to dismantle these dams. Where are we in this FERC process?

HAMANN:

Yeah, well, I'll back up a little farther than I normally would. Way back in 2017, PG&E thought they might actually relicense this project. And so they started that process, and then about a year and a half in, they said, eh, actually, we're gonna withdraw our notice of intent to relicense. That was a really important moment because after they withdrew that NOI, both PG&E and FERC tried to find a buyer for the project. They had an orphan project process where they sought buyers anywhere in the entire country to take over the project. And guess what? No qualified applicants came forth. And so that's why ultimately their long-term license expired in 2022.

And now the project is operating on a kind of a temporary annual license. So I just wanna say that because there's a lot of discussion right now about like, they never gave anyone the opportunity to buy the project. They certainly did. And some folks even tried pretty hard to put together a proposal.

WHEELER:

Yeah, people really kicked the tires on it, because as you said, it has, the Potter Valley Project has implications for Russian River water users, for Sonoma County, for Mendocino County. So there were certainly folks that wanted to see if they could do something with this project. And ultimately the costs, the risks were so great that all of these totally rational folks did not put in an offer for this project. And it went forward towards dam decommissioning.

HAMANN:

Yeah, so we are now in the decommissioning process. Last summer, PG&E submitted their surrender application to FERC. And then FERC opened a comment period on that we all had a chance throughout last fall to give lots of lots of input on that they in fact extended that comment period. So it was like several months of, like, I want to say, probably a little over 1000 comments submitted into the docket, at least about half of which were very much in support of dam removal. So now just a couple, about about two months ago, FERC began their NEPA process, their National Environmental Policy Act process, to do an environmental analysis of actual dam removal and what that's going to look like. If they did everything really quickly, and no one pestered them, this could be completed in about two years, but it's probably going to take a little bit longer than that.

And then there's also a similar kind of process going on at the state level, the California Water Board will begin their CEQA process to issue a clean water certification that will have conditions about how the sediment is managed during removal.

WHEELER:

Okay, so we have PG&E and FERC, or PG&E wants to get rid of these dams, is moving forward and is trying to receive permission to do dam removal. And the Trump administration comes in and is trying to throw sand in the gears here. And it seems that they found a weird water district based in Southern California, Lake Elsinore Water District, to help them with their plans, just kind of mucking with California dam removal projects. So tell us about Lake Elsinore and their attempts to intervene in FERC proceedings and what the heck this intervention means. Make sense of this for me.

HAMANN:

Yeah, so we first heard about the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District when Brooke Rollins, who's the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, tweeted a few months ago, hey, there's a buyer for the Potter Valley Project, and they're going to revitalize hydropower and do all these great things. It turns out they're not actually a buyer. They are apparently an interested party, though the Water District has yet to have any sort of public discussion about this interest. So they're operating in a kind of weird zone here, where they're spending a lot of their ratepayers' funds to travel up to Potter Valley, to travel up to Ukiah to give comments in person instead of just submitting them online like everybody else.

WHEELER:

When Alicia says weird here, I think that we could also read that to mean illegal because they are bypassing the Bagley-Keene Open Meetings Act, the Brown Act in making, seemingly making decisions about how to use district resources outside of public meetings. Sure seems like they're doing that sort of illegal communication.

HAMANN:

Yeah, and there's, you know, there's all kinds of like, at some point, we should have an in-depth conversation about all the little threads on this. Darcy Burke, who is one of the board members of the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, she has all kinds of like personal businesses and connections that she's clearly trying to leverage here.

But Elsinore Valley basically says that they want to take over the project and keep the dams in place. Now they've said this also in, like I said, kind of disjointed in weird ways, because they're not officially saying that as a board as a public entity. But they're certainly taking a lot of expensive actions to support this like due diligence mission that they're on. So the some of the like bizarre pieces of this are that the water district is not actually connected to the State Water Project, or the Central Valley Project for that matter, nor is the Eel River. So there's some some questions about like, what would they do with the water that's being diverted? And what like, if they can't produce electricity, because the current FERC license has expired, they would have to get a new one that they start from scratch. That doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Darcy Burke has said in like, interviews with this influencer that was really pushing her agenda that, oh, well that they would just sell the water to the current water users in the Russian River. And some of the interesting materials we've uncovered through our Public Records Act requests indicate that they think they could charge water users in the Russian River, something like $8,000 an acre foot for this water. Folks who are unfamiliar, that is an insanely high rate.

WHEELER:

That's like the highest rate in California.

HAMANN:

I mean, currently the highest rate in California is about $2,800 per acre, so yeah, it's the whole thing is just nuts.

WHEELER:

Okay, so they have applied to FERC to be an intervener in this process. And we saw in the Lost Coast Outpost recently that FERC told them to FERC off. Good pun. Thank you, Hank Sims. And they were denied being an intervener because they tried to get into this process too late. So this is good, I'm sure, on one hand, because they were denied something. But as I understand, it also doesn't mean that Lake Elsinore is out of options here or that they have no longer any interest in Eel River dams. So explain what this intervener thing means and why we should still be taking these Trumpsters from Southern California seriously.

HAMANN:

Yeah, so it's it's a little wonky, but basically being an intervener in a FERC proceeding gives an entity standing to sue at the end of FERC's decision making process. So in this case, they filed seven or eight months late to be an intervener in the license surrender proceedings. Remember, I was talking about that comment period back at the end of the year that was extended through December, they filed comments in that comment period, they knew it was happening. And interestingly enough, the attorney that they're working with is actually the former chair of FERC commissioners. So this is someone who really knows how FERC processes work. They totally should have just filed a motion to intervene back then. Why they didn't, I couldn't tell you. But they have done so now, far too late in the process.

One of the things that you need to establish to earn standing as an intervener is that you have a reasonable or as an attorney would put it like a legally cognizable interest proceeding. And you know, they could probably establish that. But if you're a late intervener, the threshold is quite a bit higher. And to be frank, FERC has precedent that they really just don't allow late interventions at all. A little while ago, I can't remember what the particular docket item was. But FERC actually denied late intervener status to the Wiyot tribe and the Round Valley tribe, because they were maybe an hour late with their filing. Because of course, the time zone that we're adhering to is East Coast time. And us over here on the Pacific Coast, sometimes forget about that. And so they were maybe not even an entire hour late, they could maybe they were like 15 minutes late or something. And FERC still denied their their standing as an intervener.

So it wasn't entirely surprising when FERC denied Elsinore Valley's request also, especially given that they were so late. The other threshold that you have to meet if you are a late intervener is proving that your interest in the project does not harm the interest of other interveners. And in this case, it certainly does. So that that's another really good reason that FERC denied this request for late intervention. Now, Elsinore Valley does have 30 days to appeal the decision. We'll see if they do that. If they do, I think we will probably just reiterate the same comments that we've already submitted to FERC, which is their, their interest in this whole process is to destroy the plan that everyone else has teamed up to agree on.

WHEELER:

So they are no longer an intervener or cannot be an intervener and so they will lack standing at the conclusion of this process to sue, but it doesn't mean that they aren't done trying to mess with ill river dam removal. Can you talk about the continued threat and other options and things that we need to stay vigilant to?

HAMANN:

Yeah, well, as much as we are really pleased with the way that PG&E has been handling this dam removal, PG&E is motivated to get rid of this project because it poses a huge risk to them. It costs them a lot of money. That's like their publicly stated reason is that it's long been an uneconomical project, particularly in the last five years since they haven't generated any electricity.

But I don't think that the dam safety risk has gone unnoticed either. PG&E has made over the last couple of years some really big, serious moves to try to mitigate the seismic risk. And I still think that if Elsinore Valley was able to make an offer to PG&E that they couldn't refuse, PG&E would take that. They wanna get out from under this project as soon as possible. Right now, their assessment is that the license surrender process and decommissioning is their quickest route to get rid of this project. But if a quicker route emerged, maybe they would take that.

WHEELER:

Suckers wanted dams that have a earthquake fault running underneath them and all the liability. Yeah, take it please. Yeah

HAMANN:

Yeah.

It's unclear to me at this point what role the California Division of Safety of Dams might have in preventing a new owner from taking over the project. There would be permitting requirements with the state of California if they're gonna operate it as a water project. There would be the issue of the water rights transfer, which isn't too complicated, but there would be a number of steps that a whole host of us would be objecting to all along the way. So it wouldn't be an easy path, but there are other paths by which Elsinore Valley could still pursue taking over this project.

WHEELER:

Yeah, this is one of the difficulties in the Trump administration is that we need to take everything seriously, even when it's unserious. And this is an unserious idea that we need to take seriously.

HAMANN:

Well, and one thing that we haven't talked about yet is the other Southern California water agency that's at play here. And that is, oh gosh, am I gonna pronounce this right? The San Gorgonio Pass Water Agency. They also have been quite involved in exploring the potential of taking over this project. They have an agreement that I still haven't actually seen a copy of, but they have some kind of agreement in place with Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District relating to the Potter Valley Project. And one of their board members is on record with a local media outlet, highlighting the fact that San Gorgonio Pass is the third largest investor in the Sites Reservoir Project, this new gigantic reservoir that they're planning to build north of Sacramento, east of the Eel River headwaters. And he made a point to mention that he knows that the Lake Pillsbury Reservoir is only 37 miles from the future home of Sites Reservoir.

So the idea that Eel River water could be used to fill Sites Reservoir has long been a concern that's kind of been on our back burner and something that we've been watchful for. But it clearly is something that these Southern California water agencies are also thinking of. And we need to be really careful about that.

WHEELER:

Well, there was a recent notice that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was going to extend the comment period for what's called scoping for this dam removal EIR or EIS. Tell us about that and why it is maybe a little bit ominous.

HAMANN:

Yeah, so for about a month now, we've all been submitting comments on scoping for the NEPA process, which is basically telling FERC what kinds of issues they should be considering in their environmental analysis of dam removal. If you want instructions about how to comment, you can go to eelriver.org. We've got all the talking points and the ways to comment outlined there. One thing that we are concerned about is we thought that they might extend this comment period to allow time to have an in-person hearing in Humboldt County. It seems reasonable. Much of the Eel is in Humboldt County, and going all the way down to Ukiah is very difficult for folks. They did a similar thing for the Klamath, but that does not appear to be the reason for this comment period extension. It appears to be at the request of the Department of Interior.

So we're a little concerned about that. We're watching the docket to see what's going to come through from the feds, but I just want to say thank you to all of the people who have submitted comments. If any of you folks who happen to be at Septentrio Winery during our event last weekend are listening, thank you for listening to my spiel when I came up to your table and handed you a piece of paper to write your comments on. If you haven't yet submitted your comments, you have now until September, I think September 18th. So go to eelriver.org, submit some extra comments because we need a lot of weight behind us to counter what we are expecting to see from the feds.

WHEELER:

All right, Alicia, thank you so much for joining the show.

All right, join us next week on this time channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.