The Potter Valley Venture, which dams Northern California’s Eel River, isn’t doing very a lot proper now. Its reservoir is clogged with sediment, and drought usually empties it out. The venture as soon as supported a hydroelectric energy plant that would produce about 9 megawatts of electrical energy, which is about 1 p.c of a typical fossil-fuel-fired plant, but it surely has not labored in years. Plus, a few of its infrastructure could also be vulnerable to collapsing throughout an earthquake.
Like hundreds of different small dams throughout the U.S., it’s now extra bother than it’s value. That’s why the utility that owns the venture, Pacific Gasoline and Electrical, moved final 12 months to demolish it and undam the river. PG&E has wished to desert the venture for many years, however a remaining elimination settlement required years of cautious negotiation. The dam venture at present provides water to vineyards and cities in Sonoma County, and it’s the only real water supply for the agricultural farm neighborhood of Potter Valley.
The ultimate settlement was a fragile compromise: The Spherical Valley Indian Tribe, which has senior rights to water from the Eel, agreed to let some water movement from the river to farmers by a diversion tunnel, and the farmers agreed to simply accept about half the water that they had acquired in previous years when the reservoir was full. Supporters say that dam elimination will restore pure water movement for weak fish which have lengthy inhabited the river.
However now, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins seems decided to explode the deal.
The longtime ally of President Trump has joined a small group of native residents in mounting a public marketing campaign in opposition to the deal. She could effectively succeed — she’s already recognized an obscure Southern California water company that implies it’s open to taking management of the dams.
The intervention is simply the newest in a collection of efforts by Rollins to show conservation points into culture-war fodder. Beneath her management, the U.S. Division of Agriculture, or USDA, has focused federal funding for sustainable farming practices in addition to applications that broaden farmers’ entry to USDA assist — terminating billions of {dollars} value of grants on the grounds that such initiatives are what Rollins has known as “woke” holdovers from the Biden administration.
Supporters of dam elimination have reacted to Rollins’s intervention with incredulity.
“It’s probably not even the federal authorities [opposing the agreement]. It’s a few MAGA extremists who occur to be authorities actors,” stated U.S. Consultant Jared Huffman, a Democrat who represents the realm in Congress. “It’s kind of political theater masked as some kind of coverage transfer that purports to be about taking up and working this venture, which is fairly preposterous.”
Rollins’s try to derail the Potter Valley deal has thrown the area’s future into query. With out an settlement, the Eel River and its surrounding atmosphere will seemingly proceed to deteriorate. The Spherical Valley tribe might sue to say its senior rights over the river’s water, resulting in extended litigation that would jeopardize water availability for close by farms and cities. And water deliveries from the degraded reservoir will seemingly proceed to be meager. Extra broadly, the event threatens a latest development of negotiation and compromise in weak watersheds throughout the nation. The Potter Valley venture is the newest in a collection of dam elimination agreements, from the Juniata River in Pennsylvania to the huge Klamath River dam elimination on the California-Oregon border. These bipartisan agreements are fragile even in the very best of instances, however by politicizing the problem, Rollins could have made a everlasting truce unattainable.
Despite the fact that many farmers who obtain water from the Potter Valley Venture assist the dam elimination settlement, there are various native landowners and conservative residents who oppose it. Some of the vocal is a ranch-animal veterinarian named Wealthy Brazil, who lives within the small city of Potter Valley, simply south of the primary venture dam. Brazil’s daughter, Keely Brazil Covello, is a filmmaker who writes a weblog known as America Unwon that advocates for farmers and ranchers. Her weblog, which is ranked forty fourth on Substack’s “Local weather & Surroundings” leaderboard, has publicized the perceived downsides of the deal and framed it as an existential risk to Potter Valley.
“It will change the face of that space,” stated Covello, who now lives in Southern California. “Individuals must know what’s occurring.”
After PG&E secured the dam elimination deal, Covello started writing steadily concerning the deal. In early September, Rollins retweeted one in all Covello’s posts about Potter Valley with the caption, “I’m on it.” That month, Covello and her father helped manage a letter addressed to Rollins and 7 different leaders within the Trump administration that urged the officers to reject the settlement as “insufficient, noncompliant with federal regulation, and dismissive of neighborhood and environmental penalties.” Rollins and Covello later engaged in what gave the impression to be a coordinated messaging marketing campaign concerning the dam elimination effort.
Within the following months, Rollins held a collection of conferences with Covello, Wealthy Brazil, and different native dam elimination opponents, and posted to social media about how the state legislature and Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom are placing “fish over individuals” — a regular assault line used on environmental activists in California. In December, Rollins printed a letter to the editor in a neighborhood newspaper, The Mendocino Voice, condemning the dam elimination effort for its risk to farmers and ranchers within the area.
Later that month, the agriculture secretary additionally filed a discover to intervene within the venture proceedings in addition to feedback to the Federal Vitality Regulatory Fee, or FERC, the nation’s unbiased dam regulator, requesting that the fee droop PG&E’s formal request to give up its license for the dams. “If this plan goes by as proposed, it should devastate a whole bunch of household farms and wipe out greater than a century of agricultural custom in Potter Valley,” stated Rollins in a press release. “This plan would put numerous USDA investments in danger and go away households much more weak to drought and wildfire.”
A number of present and former USDA staffers and officers advised Grist that the USDA’s arguments in its request to FERC seem to omit the conservation and environmental priorities of the company’s mission areas. In it, the company argued that the dam decommissioning would trigger opposed impacts to a lot of USDA’s mission areas, claiming impacts throughout 5 of the USDA’s subagencies, together with the U.S. Forest Service and the Pure Sources Conservation Service, or NRCS.
Oliver Contreras / AFP by way of Getty Pictures
Erin Foster West, a former NRCS staffer who’s now government applications director on the Nationwide Younger Farmers Coalition, stated that whereas the NRCS and Forest Service have traditionally managed and labored to assist very small dams, the Potter Valley Venture seems to don’t have any apparent connection to USDA’s operations.
Gloria Montaño Greene, who served as deputy undersecretary of the USDA’s Farm Manufacturing and Conservation mission space throughout the Biden administration and was concerned with the Klamath Dam elimination, stated these processes sometimes unfold very in a different way than the administration’s present method — slowly, throughout a number of administrations, with a variety of stakeholders on the desk. The USDA’s public intervention right here, she instructed, appears nothing like that.
“What’s the NRCS saying? What’s the state of California saying? What are the tribal leads for the realm saying? There are a lot of voices within the dialog,” she stated.
Solutions to those questions have remained elusive, and the story has solely gotten stranger. Covello, Brazil, and the opposite dam elimination opponents met with USDA officers in January on the Farm Bureau conference in Anaheim and in Washington, D.C., a month later. Then, in late April, Rollins introduced that an entity had emerged to purchase the dams from PG&E: the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, a water service supplier some 500 miles away in Riverside County. A member of the Elsinore Valley board appeared on Covello’s podcast and declared her ambition to take over the dams, framing it as an altruistic gesture that can shield water provide for all Californians.
“All of California advantages when there’s water and all of California is harmed when there’s not,” Burke advised Grist when requested why she wished to accumulate the venture. She admitted that “there is perhaps no profit” to her district and stated that “we’re simply and doing our due diligence.” Burke added that she first realized concerning the dam elimination deal when she learn an X submit from Chad Bianco, the Riverside County sheriff who’s operating for governor as a Republican.
Policymakers and environmentalists have blasted Elsinore Valley’s involvement as at greatest a political stunt and at worst a plan to siphon water from Northern California and ship it farther south. There is no such thing as a infrastructure that would convey water from Potter Valley right down to Elsinore Valley, making a direct water switch bodily unattainable, however that has not quelled suspicions. Huffman’s workplace has begun a proper investigation into Elsinore’s involvement.
For Rollins, the political frenzy across the dam elimination could also be a part of the purpose, in accordance with Alicia Hamann, government director of the environmental advocacy group Pals of the Eel River.
“The involvement of this water district, almost 600 miles away from the venture, with no tangible connection to the ability or the water related to the venture, is absolutely weird,” stated Hamann. She suspects that the administration could possibly be utilizing the case to attraction to farmers forward of November’s midterm elections. Farmers, regardless of voting overwhelmingly for the GOP, have been more and more dissatisfied with the administration’s commerce insurance policies and geopolitical conflicts roiling America’s farm economic system.
In response to inquiries from Grist, a USDA spokesperson reiterated Rollins’s place, saying that dam elimination “is anticipated to create extreme, lasting penalties for the area’s agricultural producers and surrounding communities.” The spokesperson added that eradicating the dams would hurt water high quality and compromise ingesting water provides, cut back firefighting capability, and put groundwater wells in danger “whereas jeopardizing substantial USDA investments tied to loans, insurance coverage applications, conservation work, and rural growth.” The spokesperson additionally pointed to different “unresolved points” however didn’t make clear them.
Rollins’s intervention has fractured the fragile consensus across the dam elimination settlement, however nobody concerned appears to have any clue what is going to occur subsequent. PG&E’s proposal to decommission the dams continues to be pending earlier than FERC, and neither USDA nor Elsinore Valley has submitted a proper proposal to take them over.
Within the meantime, the 2 sides of the controversy have begun to change authorized barbs. Pals of the Eel River and different environmental organizations submitted a public information request to the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District on Might 5. The request, a duplicate of which was shared with Grist, cites considerations that the water district’s determination to discover buying the dams from PG&E violates the Brown Act, a California regulation that requires native legislative our bodies to conduct their enterprise in public.
Elsinore Valley seems to be pushing again. That very same week, the water district and the America First Coverage Institute, a conservative suppose tank cofounded by Rollins herself in 2021, started to file a torrent of their very own public information requests to organizations that had been concerned in dam elimination talks. Whereas a few of these had been governmental businesses which are legally required to reply to such requests, others had been personal sector actors which are sometimes not topic to the regulation, just like the conservation nonprofit CalTrout. The request to CalTrout, a duplicate of which was shared with Grist, sought all digital communications regarding the Potter Valley Venture; all information, inside paperwork, and funding functions; and all communications shared with a wide range of associated entities and businesses.
“We’re not a public company. So we had been actually confused we acquired it,” stated Charlie Schneider, a venture lead on the nonprofit. “What are they even after is difficult to know, proper?”
Simply days later, nevertheless, the America First Coverage Institute rescinded its request. (The Institute declined to reply to a request for remark, as a substitute directing Grist to the nonprofit’s public remark submitted to FERC opposing the dam elimination.)
Crucial native participant within the Potter Valley battle is the Spherical Valley Indian Tribe, which has senior rights to the water from the Eel River, that means it might, in principle, assert a declare to the water that farmers and cities who depend on the Potter Valley Venture are actually utilizing. The tribe has been pushing dam elimination for generations, and the PG&E settlement was solely doable because of their cooperation. They’ll enable farmers who acquired water from the dams to obtain a few of their Eel River water by a brand new diversion tunnel, and in change, the farmers will give the tribe cash for ecosystem restoration.
In an interview with Grist, tribal president Joseph Parker vowed to say his tribe’s water rights if USDA continued to dam the elimination deal. This might imply a prolonged adjudication of the Eel River’s water rights, which might block Elsinore or any farmers downstream from taking water from the dams even when they did keep in place.
“We talked to USDA, we advised them our story, they usually listened, however you possibly can inform they didn’t wish to pay attention,” stated Parker. “[The farmers] have been getting free water this entire hundred-plus years. Hopefully they know that we aren’t backing down and that we’re right here for the lengthy battle.” The tribe has addressed letters to each Rollins and Elsinore warning them about “the potential liabilities that any successor proprietor of those dams will seemingly face, and the resolve of our individuals to oppose their retention.”
In the meantime, locals who’ve come to assist the settlement argue that there’s no various to dam elimination now that PG&E has determined to dump the venture.
“If anyone had requested me ten years in the past what would occur if [the Project] was gone I’d have stated it will be disastrous,” stated Janet Pauli, a grape and hay farmer who’s one in all Potter Valley’s largest landowners and the top of the irrigation district representing many of the space’s farmers. “However that was then, and that is now.” Pauli helped safe the 2025 settlement in change for water diversion that may provide farms and cities downstream from Potter Valley throughout the winter.
Stephen Lam / San Francisco Chronicle by way of Getty Pictures
Pauli additionally argues that it’s doable to mitigate the destructive results of dam elimination for native farmers in Potter Valley by increasing a close-by dam on the Russian River and constructing different water storage tasks within the valley. She stated that opponents of dam elimination haven’t been advocating for these tasks, which might make the realm extra self-reliant.
Covello and the opposite opponents of dam elimination don’t imagine that these alternative tasks for Potter Valley will ever be constructed, or that the winter water diversions from the Eel River will come to fruition. She additionally stated she’s heard from each tribal members within the space and staff at PG&E that dam elimination will supply far fewer advantages than proponents declare.
“It’s not gonna occur, and it’s not gonna work,” she stated. “What we now have works proper now, and California can’t construct something to save lots of its life.”
A spokesperson for PG&E stated the utility had tried a number of instances to discover a purchaser for the dam and is shifting ahead with decommissioning. The spokesperson stated that there was “misinformation” concerning the utility’s position and the provision of alternate options to dam elimination. “There’s a vital distinction between an entity inquiring concerning the Potter Valley Venture and really submitting a proposal to accumulate the venture,” the spokesperson stated in an obvious reference to Elsinore Valley’s overtures.
Maintaining the dams up can be an infinite problem, even when Elsinore Valley succeeds in buying them. By all accounts, the Potter Valley Venture is in horrible situation. The hydroelectric energy home broke down in 2021, and the diversion tunnel from the dams sits on a seismic fault zone able to triggering a significant earthquake. Moreover, the dams are out of compliance with federal environmental legal guidelines round fish passage and water high quality. Upgrading them to satisfy all these situations would take a whole bunch of tens of millions of {dollars}.
FERC, for its half, seems to be shifting ahead with the Potter Valley dam license give up and decommissioning in lieu of any viable various. On Might 22, the company kicked off its environmental evaluation of the Potter Valley elimination venture by releasing its first Nationwide Environmental Coverage Act scoping doc. That doc calls dam retention “infeasible” due to seismic stability considerations, fruitless previous efforts to search out an operator for the venture, and PG&E’s most popular various to take away the construction.
“FERC is saying, ‘There’s nothing else in entrance of us to evaluate,’” stated CalTrout’s Schenider. “It’s definitely useful [in] understanding the place issues are literally at.”
Despite the fact that they’re on reverse sides of California’s conventional conservation debate, which pits environmentalists who wish to maintain water in rivers in opposition to farmers who wish to use it, Schneider agrees with Pauli, the native grape and hay farmer who thinks dam elimination is the very best path ahead for the neighborhood.
“For USDA, some funding assist for these farmers … strikes me as a significantly better use of their time and power than making an attempt to save lots of 100-year-old dams which are finally going to fill with sediment,” he stated.
Kyle Farmer, a farmer and rancher who lives in Potter Valley, stated the reality is much extra nuanced than the fish-versus-people framing that Rollins has adopted. He as soon as fought to protect the dam, however now he views the large problem in Potter Valley as discovering a technique to make farmers and residents entire as soon as the dams inevitably go down.
“It might be nice if this was a fish-versus-farmer downside, as a result of there may be quite a lot of precedent on tips on how to deal with these,” he stated. “What we haven’t made a lot progress on is tips on how to exchange ageing infrastructure. That is extra like a city whose bridge is failing.”
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