U.S. Congressman Jared Huffman calls the Trump cabinet’s Potter Valley letter ‘incoherent’

MENDOCINO CO., 6/2/26 — The water that keeps the upper Russian River flowing through the dry months — the flow farms and towns from Ukiah to Healdsburg lean on every summer — comes from a century-old diversion the federal government spent six years agreeing to shrink. On Friday, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins told Congressman Jared Huffman  in a letter dated May 29 she’s not done fighting to keep that system in place, dams and all. On Tuesday, Congressman Huffman, who represents the district in which the dams are located, told the Voice her letter was “incoherent.”

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins replied to Rep. Jared Huffman’s investigation into the administration’s role in the Potter Valley Project with a letter dated May 29. The administration, she wrote, “will entertain the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District and any other legitimate party expressing interest in purchasing the Potter Valley Project.” Keeping the dams and restarting their idle hydropower, she added, “has the potential to advance the President’s energy dominance agenda.”

Huffman, whose North Coast district holds both dams PG&E wants gone, didn’t buy it. “Like most of the gobbledygook in that letter, it’s nonsense,” he said in an interview Tuesday, after his office gave the letter to The Mendocino Voice and Bay City News. Rollins’ letter warns that removing the dams threatens “the estimated 750,000 residents whose survival depends on a stable water supply.” Huffman gets his own water from the same system. “For her to lecture me about my water supplies is pretty rich,” he said.

The deal already on the table, he said, is what protects that supply — not the dams as they stand. “The deal is in place, which is a miracle, that we’ve got this many stakeholders moving forward toward a real solution, and it does keep the water flowing,” Huffman said. Told that Washington frames dam removal as cutting people off, he said it’s the reverse: “If you’re trying to freeze the status quo and drag us back to the way things have been for the past century, you’re going to put water supplies at risk in the Russian River basin.”

Huffman opened his probe April 28 with a pair of letters — one to Rollins and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, another to Elsinore Valley board President Andrew Morris. He wanted to know how two cabinet secretaries came to champion a Riverside County water district’s interest in a pair of dams hundreds of miles from its service area, and he gave them until May 12 to turn over records. Rollins’ reply, more than two weeks late, is the first substantive answer he’s gotten from either official.

In those letters, Huffman tied the Elsinore Valley bid to a century of attempts to move North Coast water south. The plan, he wrote, “revives a long and contentious history of plans to divert Eel River water to distant interests in Southern California and the Central Valley” — a reference to the never-built Dos Rios Dam, which he said left “an enduring legacy of mistrust among Northern California tribes, communities, and stakeholders who would have borne all of the impacts of such a scheme while receiving none of the benefits.”

Rollins’ response doesn’t square with much of the record

The Potter Valley Project is two dams — Scott Dam at Lake Pillsbury and Cape Horn Dam downstream — and a powerhouse that once turned Eel River water into electricity on its way to the Russian River. The powerhouse stopped years ago after its equipment failed, and PG&E has been trying to hand the project off ever since. A nationwide call for buyers in 2018 drew no viable offers. A federal “orphan” process in 2019 drew no applicants. In July 2025, the utility filed to surrender the license and take the dams out.

Rollins’ letter talks about “restarting hydroelectric generation.” But PG&E’s own project manager, Tony Gigliotti, told the Voice on a May 22 call that the utility doesn’t see the project as built for the pumped-storage power its boosters have floated. The two reservoirs sit about 12 miles apart, with no reservoir below the powerhouse to pump water back into. “The project is not set up for a natural pumped-storage option,” he said.

He wouldn’t call it impossible — “anything is feasible with enough time, money” — but said PG&E doesn’t see it as something “easily transitioned.” Regulators are moving the other way: the same day as that call, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission opened environmental scoping on PG&E’s plan to pull the dams out.

The buyer in the secretary’s letter hasn’t, by its own account, bought anything. Asked directly whether the district’s interest includes any pumped-storage or hydropower component, Elsinore Valley’s public information officer, Sylvia Ornelas, told the Voice the district is “in the initial stages of its due diligence and information-gathering process” and “limited in what we can share at this time.” PG&E says it has met with the district but gotten no formal proposal, a point the utility confirmed on the May 22 call.

Political posturing

Huffman thinks the hunt for a coherent business motive is the wrong one. He credited the reporting on why Elsinore Valley might want the project, then waved it off. “I think they’re far less serious than you are,” he said. “They’re just trying to get this done and profit from it.” The likeliest explanation, he said, isn’t an engineering case at all: “This is most likely not rational. It is political.”

Then there’s the number. Rollins’ letter says removing the dams threatens “the estimated 750,000 residents whose survival depends on a stable water supply.” A few lines down, the same letter puts it at “hundreds of thousands.” It’s a round figure, and it doesn’t hold still even inside one letter.

The deal on the table doesn’t end the diversion. It keeps a smaller, seasonal flow into the Russian River while the dams come out — the compromise Sonoma Water, the Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission, the Round Valley Indian Tribes, Humboldt County and state and fishery agencies spent six years building.

And the decision isn’t Rollins’ to make. The Agriculture Department intervened in the FERC proceeding in December, which lets it argue its case, but it can’t approve a sale or block a surrender. That call belongs to FERC, which is taking public comment on PG&E’s plan through July 24. PG&E’s final decommissioning plans are due in July 2027.

Huffman went further: he said Rollins is out on the limb alone. “There’s no interest in the Department of the Interior in federalizing this project,” he said, and no sign FERC intends to deviate from the surrender already underway.

“FERC is staying the course and following the rules and the law. It’s really the Secretary of Agriculture who is politically freelancing here” — and, he added, “apparently without very much to back her up.” Rollins repeatedly invoked the Trump administration in her letter; Huffman’s point is that the rest of it isn’t with her.

For now, he’s still waiting on the records he asked for. Interior, he said, “just ignored all of our questions and gave us no records.” Elsinore Valley has told his office it is complying, and he expects “a pretty good number of documents” within days. Until they arrive, he said, “we are left kind of groping for explanations.” His read on the letter he does have: “We still have no idea what the heck is going on here, if anything.”

The letter doesn’t change the schedule. It tells Huffman and the North Coast that the administration means to keep pressing for a buyer right up to the edge of a process already moving to take the dams out.

“We do need answers,” Huffman said, “and we will get them.”