UKIAH, CA., 7/14/26 — The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission took its public comment period on the Potter Valley Project in Ukiah over two days in June. Comments were made in private, behind a closed door. Press was barred and recording forbidden. The transcripts of those comments were released Monday, 20 days after the first session, over 43,000 words, more than 70 speakers.
Southern California came first. “My name is Chance Edmondson,” one opens, “and I’m with the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District.”
Edmondson is a director on that district’s board and its vice president. He was among the first people to put a word into the federal environmental record on whether PG&E should be allowed to surrender its license for the century-old Potter Valley Project and pull out Scott and Cape Horn dams.
He asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to slow down. The commission “cannot conclude surrender is the appropriate response,” he said, until it weighs “less drastic dam removal alternatives that preserve the project’s water supply benefits.”
Right behind him came Lance Eckhart, general manager of the San Gorgonio Pass Water Agency, a state water contractor in Riverside County. He was careful. “I want it to be clear that the Pass Agency is not taking a position on the ultimate outcome of the Potter Valley Project,” he said. “We are here to listen, learn, and better understand the issues and stakeholders involved in this process.”
Eckhart’s board vice president, Larry Smith, also gave his opinion. Three Southern California water men, not a local voice among them.
Residents tell a different story
Those journeying to Ukiah to give FERC their comments came from Mendocino, Lake, Humboldt and Sonoma counties. The record shows neighbors who can’t agree on the dams have no trouble at all agreeing on Lake Elsinore.
Janet Johnson drove down from Laytonville with a friend who had come to testify, and spent the evening where the public was made to spend it — in the waiting room, outside the closed door, unable to hear any of it. She was blunt about who she thought was on the other side of that door. They were “carpetbaggers scamming our water,” she told The Voice.
As it turns out, according to the written testimonies, almost nobody disagreed with her. They just couldn’t agree on anything else.
The most credentialed voice against removal has been farming Potter Valley for 56 years.
He gave his name to the court reporter as Eugene J. McGuinness McFadden, spelling the McGuinness out letter by letter, but said everybody calls him Guinness. He has farmed Potter Valley for 56 years, sat on the Potter Valley Irrigation District board for 35 of them, and holds an alternate seat on the Inland Water and Power Commission — “the main driver in Mendocino County,” as he put it.
His case is that the seismic evidence citing issues with Scott Dam can’t be examined. PG&E’s study, he said, “came up with some questionable data about seismic problems,” and “the parts of it that were released were heavily redacted, so there’s really been no credible party to view the study and see that it makes any sense.”
Nobody, he said, ever seriously priced the alternative. “They just decided that it would be better to totally take the dam out rather than mitigate the problem.” He put PG&E’s own removal estimate at $600 million. “For quite a bit less than that, we feel that mitigation measures can be employed to make the dam safe.”
There had been an earthquake that morning, and McFadden knew where PG&E was.
“PG&E is out there as we speak, and they’re actually going inside the dam,” he said. “The dam is hollow, and they’re inspecting it now.”
A FERC staffer broke in. “Are they?”
They were, McFadden said. “It was quite a jolt. Did you feel it here in Ukiah?”
The staffer admitted they had.
The clearest voice for removal came from a woman who lives in Ukiah and drinks the water they’re fighting over.
“I guess that I shower in Eel River water,” said Alicia Bales, director of the Sierra Club’s Redwood Chapter, which runs from Napa and Solano to the Oregon border and counts 8,000 members. She didn’t hedge on the dam. “I agree with their findings about Scott Dam, that it must be removed for the environmental and the safety concerns for the Eel River and my neighbors here in Mendocino County.”
And then she spent the remainder of her minutes on Elsinore’s bid to buy the Potter Valley Project for reasons that are still unclear. Bales said any decision about who ends up holding the project “should empower and ensure local water security and wellbeing, not try to extract fees or profits from us for an out-of-area operator.” Decommissioning, she said, “needs to ensure local control of infrastructure.”
The Sierra Club and Guinness McFadden, who agree on nothing else, object to the same thing.
“Wrong on all fronts”
Michael Bailey, who goes by Mickey, wants the dams gone. He has looked at them, he said, and “they seem to be in deteriorating condition. And I think the best thing to do is remove them.” In the same breath, he named what worries him more.
“The worst thing that could happen to our Eel River water is that the entire project would be affected by some other entity such as the Elsinore Water District controlling our water.”
Sarah Ryan put it harder. Ryan is the environmental director for the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians in Lake County, though she said she was speaking for herself and not the tribe. Handing the project to the Elsinore district would be “a water and money grab and a water rights grab of Lake Pillsbury,” she said — with the Round Valley tribe shut out of the negotiations, accomplished by a district “who’s had no public meetings.” Her verdict: “It’s just wrong on all fronts.”
She wants Scott Dam out. She also said the Eel’s water “should not be going to a Southern California water district.”
The dam defenders got there from the opposite direction and landed in the same place. Mendocino County third supervisorial district candidate Buffey Wright Bourassa, who opposes removal, said she wanted alternatives “that keep water management decisions in local and regional hands.” Her line: “I am absolutely not for an outside entity from even further south or all the way down south to take over our water.”
Deborah Long, also against removal, asked the commission to consider “who benefits from the removal? Only outside special interest.”
One local wants them at the table.
Kerri Vau, a seventh-generation Ukiah farmer whose family has worked the valley since the mid-1800s, called decommissioning “a catastrophe” and said she has already sat down with Lake Elsinore representatives.
“I want to point out that Lake Elsinore, I have met with them,” Vau said. “They’re a buyer at the table, and I would hope that FERC would talk to them and consider that as an option.”
The pre-buttal
The Southern Californians anticipated residents’arguments.
Larry Smith, vice president of the San Gorgonio Pass Water Agency, said that the California Water Plan is “not a Southern California plan, nor a Northern California plan” — it covers “the entirety of the state.”
Then he pointed out that his agency already has money in the neighborhood. It’s the third-largest investor in Sites Reservoir, he said — and if you stand at Scott Dam and look 37 miles east, that’s what you’re looking at. To spend “$6 or $7 billion to invest in a reservoir, building dams 37 miles away,” he said, while tearing these ones down, “does not seem like reasonable rational water management.”
The last word
One of the last people to speak Tuesday night had driven two and a half hours to get there.
Autumn Swedin came down from Fortuna because, she said, she had been asked to carry Humboldt County’s concerns to a meeting held nowhere near it. She wanted to know what happens if PG&E walks away — whether the license gets auctioned, and to whom.
“We’ve heard word of a Southern California Water District looking into buying the project,” Swedin said. “Many that live and work along the Eel River don’t want the Southern California Water District involved.”
She asked FERC to hold a session in Humboldt, in person, the way it had for Mendocino.
Then she finished, and the court reporter thanked her, and she drove home. Now finally, everyone can read what she and others said.
Written comments can still be made on the Potter Valley Project. They are due by 5 p.m. Eastern time — 2 p.m. in Ukiah — on Friday, July 24, and can be filed through FERC’s eFiling or eComment system under docket No. P-77-332. The scoping transcripts are posted in FERC’s eLibrary under accession No. 20260713-4000.
“Three Southern California water men, not a local voice among them.” – It was the locals that brought socal here.