Tribe with senior Eel River water rights shut out of White House meeting

MENDOCINO CO., 6/18/26 — Federal agriculture and interior officials convened a meeting Monday at the White House with PG&E and a Southern California water district over the future of the Eel River — and the tribe with senior water rights on that river was not in the room.

The Round Valley Indian Tribes said Wednesday that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had called the meeting, which also included Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and representatives of the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District. The subject was the Potter Valley Project, a hydroelectric complex on the Eel River that PG&E has moved to decommission.

“Her decision not to engage in government-to-government consultation prior to taking these actions is deeply troubling,” Round Valley Indian Tribes President Joseph Parker said.

Round Valley has spent years at the negotiating table with Russian River water users working out what the parties call the Two-Basin Solution — a plan to allow salmon recovery on the Eel while keeping water flowing to communities that had come to rely on diversions from the north. Parker said the administration, by pulling in a Southern California water district without notifying the tribe, is threatening to unravel that work.

The concern runs deeper than a procedural slight. Round Valley holds senior federal reserved water rights to the Eel River — rights rooted in federal Indian law that predate California’s water system and take priority over most other claims when water is short. The tribe said it is prepared to use them.

“We are committed to using every available tool to defend and promote it,” Parker said, referring to the Two-Basin Solution, “including assertion of our senior federal reserved water and fishing rights.”

Agriculture Secretary Rollins opposes the surrender application

Rollins has been pushing on the project for months. The U.S. Department of Agriculture filed formal comments and a notice of intervention in the relevant federal proceeding on Dec. 19, opposing PG&E’s application to surrender its license and decommission the dams. The Interior Department had intervened in the same proceeding more than three weeks earlier, on Nov. 26. Neither filing named the Elsinore district as a preferred buyer.

The pivot to backing a specific Southern California district came later, through social media posts and White House meetings.

Monday’s session added Interior Secretary Burgum to the picture, which the tribe said raises a separate concern: the Interior Department carries a federal trust responsibility to tribal nations — a legal duty that requires consultation before the government takes positions that could affect assets held in trust, including reserved water rights. Interior’s own November filing cited that trust obligation — under 25 U.S.C. 2 — as one of the statutes it intended to invoke in the proceeding. The agency has not consulted Round Valley, Parker said.

Moreover, neither Rollins nor officials from Elsinore  has accepted an invitation from Round Valley to visit the reservation, Parker said.

If Elsinore gets the rights, expect water prices to sky-rocket

The Elsinore district’s internal memos put 50,000 acre-feet of Eel River water annually under the district’s potential control — water it could charge downstream water users to access. But PG&E records don’t line up with that number.

A PG&E presentation produced in the same records request shows that actual annual diversions through the project averaged roughly 40,000 acre-feet in recent years — well below the assumed 50,000 — and have trended down sharply for decades. Federal filings in the decommissioning proceeding put the replacement facility’s projected capacity at about 7,900 acre-feet per year.

The Elsinore district serves more than 163,000 people in Southern California — over 500 miles from the Eel River. The district never planned to pipe that water south. Internal memos show the plan was to buy the rights on the cheap and sell the water back to the same farmers and cities already using it, at a steep markup.

Elsinore director Darcy Burke valued the rights at $400 million, based on selling 50,000 acre-feet a year at $8,000 per acre-foot — more than 200 times what local farmers pay today. She put the overall value as high as $850 million. A separate set of talking points, labeled “Message Maps,” advised the district to pressure PG&E into handing over the entire project for $1 — arguing the utility should be glad to unload a money-loser.

In December, Elsinore filed formal opposition to PG&E’s decommissioning plan with federal regulators. The filing, signed by manager Thomas and submitted through outside counsel, raised the Safe Drinking Water Act and California’s Human Right to Water as grounds for   blocking decommissioning. It made no mention of the district’s financial analyses or its interest in acquiring the project.

The Eel and the Round Valley tribes

The Potter Valley Project’s history with Round Valley is long and one-sided. The dams went up more than a century ago without tribal consent. The diversions sent Eel River water into the Russian River basin, where downstream users staked claims over generations. The tribe got nothing from the arrangement.

“Yet we live under its adverse effects daily,” Parker said.

PG&E’s decision to walk away opened a rare window to restore salmon runs on the Eel and begin redressing that history. Parker said. Round Valley wants restoration to go forward without abandoning Russian River communities — which is the point of the Two-Basin Solution — but the tribe must be at the table for any arrangement to hold.

“The future of the Eel and Russian rivers should be decided by the people who live along them and depend on them, not brokered in Washington between political appointees and outside interests,” said Charlie Schneider, connectivity program manager for California Trout, a Two-Basin Solution partner.

Secretary Rollins had not reached out to the tribe as of Wednesday, Parker said.