MENDOCINO CO., 5/1/26 — The Potter Valley Project, a century-old hydropower complex in Mendocino County, is on its way to the recycle bin. PG&E filed last summer to surrender its federal license. Two dams — Scott and Cape Horn — are coming down. The Eel River water rights pass to the Round Valley Indian Tribes for the first time in a century.
Now a Riverside County water district 600 miles to the south says it might want to buy a piece. The Trump administration is backing the bid. What the district actually wants — water, electricity, or both — is the question. And the district isn’t answering it.
The dams are on their way out
The spillway gates at Scott Dam — half of the project’s dam infrastructure — have been wedged open since 2023, by order of the state. Lake Pillsbury sits at three-quarters of its old capacity. Down the canyon, in Potter Valley itself, the powerhouse hasn’t run since June 2021, when its main transformer failed during routine maintenance. PG&E announced in April 2023 it wouldn’t buy a replacement. Last October, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission accepted the company’s application to surrender the project’s license and tear down Scott and Cape Horn dams.
A century-old hydropower complex tied to the Russian River by a tunnel through a mountain, on its way out.
PG&E’s surrender filing says only one thing is still on the table for any third party: “certain features of the project such as those for water conveyance.” The federal hydropower license, the company says, is no longer transferable. That’s the narrow opening the Riverside district is reaching into.
The deal local stakeholders built
What an outside acquisition would have to break is the edifice local stakeholders have already built.
Last summer, every party with a stake in the Eel River signed a deal to settle what comes next. The signers: PG&E itself, the Round Valley Indian Tribes, Humboldt and Mendocino counties, Sonoma County’s water agencies, the state’s fish-and-wildlife regulators, and the conservation groups CalTrout and Trout Unlimited.
Under that agreement: PG&E surrenders the license. Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam come down. A new, smaller diversion at Lake Van Arsdale — the New Eel-Russian Facility, or NERF — takes Eel River water during high-flow periods only.
PG&E’s diversion rights pass to the Round Valley Indian Tribes. The tribes lease a share back to the Eel-Russian Project Authority — a joint body of the local water agencies — in exchange for annual payments and ecological protections. The tribes hold a seat on the authority’s five-member board, alongside two for the Mendocino Inland Water and Power Commission, one for Sonoma Water and one for Sonoma County.
That structure is what Rep. Jared Huffman — whose district covers the Eel River basin — was pointing at on April 22 when he called it “a carefully negotiated two-basin solution that is on the verge of restoring the Eel River while protecting our water supplies and actually securing local ownership of the water right on the Eel River for the first time in a century.”
It is a working framework. Tribes, counties, water agencies, fish-and-game regulators and conservation groups — all on the same page, all with seats at the same table. It took years to build. An outside acquisition would have to break some of those seats.
It’s the tribes’ water — and the tribes haven’t been called
The Round Valley Indian Tribes’ position is that they have held the senior water and fishing rights on the Eel River since time immemorial. From their perspective, that agreement is not a transfer of rights from PG&E. It is the federal recognition of a senior claim that has always been theirs.
The Round Valley Indian Tribes are a sovereign nation under federal law. Any federal action that affects their senior rights triggers a duty of meaningful government-to-government consultation under the federal trust responsibility doctrine. That duty arises from treaty-era principles, predates the current administration by more than a century, and is not optional. It falls on the federal agencies whose actions touch tribal interests: the US Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior and FERC.
Tribes President Joseph Parker said Tuesday the tribes have not been brought into the conversation about the Riverside bid at all. “I don’t know anything about their water district down there,” he said in a phone interview. Asked whether anyone from the Riverside water district, PG&E or any federal agency had contacted the tribes about the bid, Parker said: “No. Nothing.” Asked what he wanted readers to understand, he said: “Like I’ve been saying, the dams are coming down. PG&E or some other way, the dams are coming down.”
That answer means no one — not USDA, not Interior, not the Riverside district’s board, not the Trump administration — has begun the consultation that federal trust doctrine would require before any acquisition of any project feature could legitimately move forward. Whatever is happening between Washington and Riverside County, the sovereign nation whose rights are most directly at stake hasn’t gotten a phone call.
A bid from 600 miles away
The Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, the agency the Trump administration named last week as a potential buyer, declined Monday to say whether power-generation components are part of its interest. District spokesperson Sylvia Ornelas called the deal “a potential infrastructure and supply acquisition” and said the district was “limited in what we can share at this time.”
Two phrases in her reply do the work. The first — infrastructure and supply acquisition” — puts infrastructure first. That maps onto the only path PG&E left open: water-conveyance features, not the license.
Then there’s the tell from a sitting board member. A week before Ornelas barely answered questions, the water district’s Vice President Darcy Burke publicly cited the “potential energy benefits” of the Potter Valley Project and noted that its powerhouse “once had the capacity to generate 9.4 megawatts.” A board member named the project’s electricity generation as part of what the district is interested in. The district’s communications office declined to address the natural follow-up. Burke didn’t respond to direct questions sent Monday morning.
What do they actually want?
Probably the same thing they’ve been after for two decades. Pumped-storage hydropower.
Pumped storage works as a giant battery: pump water uphill at night when power is cheap, release it back downhill through turbines during the afternoon peak. The economics depend on the height difference between two reservoirs.
Elsinore’s water district has been chasing a pumped-storage project on its own turf since the early 2000s — the Lake Elsinore Advanced Pumped Storage Project, or LEAPS. Federal regulators have rejected the application four times, the last one in May 2023. The private company pushing it, Nevada Hydro Company, was bought in 2022 by a California-based outfit called Bluewater Renewable Energy Storage Project, which inherited what was left.
Elsinore says it has no current relationship with either company. But Ornelas disclosed Monday — for the first time publicly — that the district had a contractual relationship with Nevada Hydro tied to an earlier LEAPS application, that the parties wound it up in a 2018 settlement, and that the settlement contains “limited provisions should a successor entity pursue a separate FERC application in the future.”
Bluewater is the textbook successor entity that clause was written to address. The district has not released the settlement; the Voice has filed a public-records request for it.
Why does any of this matter for Potter Valley? LEAPS keeps failing because Nevada Hydro can’t get the federal land permissions it needs to build a new upper reservoir in the Cleveland National Forest. The Potter Valley Project doesn’t have that problem. It’s already federally licensed. It has two reservoirs at different elevations, connected by a tunnel through a mountain. The Forest Service questions Nevada Hydro couldn’t answer for LEAPS were answered for Potter Valley a hundred years ago.
That’s why a Southern California water district with a long pumped-storage interest might be looking at a Mendocino County hydropower complex 600 miles from home.
A broken powerhouse, a derated dam
What would the district actually be buying? Less than it might sound.
The Potter Valley powerhouse hasn’t generated electricity since June 2021. PG&E first estimated an 18-to-24-month, $10-million transformer replacement. In February 2022, the utility committed to going ahead; in April 2023 it reversed course. The project will not produce another watt under PG&E. In the same period, the California Division of Safety of Dams approved a permanent opening of Scott Dam’s spillway gates after a seismic analysis by Gannett Fleming changed the dam’s condition rating from “Satisfactory” to “Fair.” Lake Pillsbury’s storage capacity has been cut by roughly 25 percent — about 20,000 acre-feet.
A water district acquiring Potter Valley as a passive water-supply purchase would be buying a non-functioning powerhouse and a structurally derated dam. A district acquiring it for the head differential between Lake Pillsbury and Van Arsdale Reservoir — the kind of asset a pumped-storage operator values — would be buying something different.
There’s also no pipe between the Eel River and Lake Elsinore. There is no plausible way for Eel River water itself to reach Riverside County. Any Southern California buyer of a North Coast water project would have to lean on paper-water moves — trades, exchanges, banking — to make the acquisition mean anything for ratepayers 600 miles away. Or it would have to be interested in something other than the water.
What does Elsinore Valley water district’s own house look like?
The water district’s customers in Riverside County are watching their bills rise to fund roughly $500 million in capital projects already underway, including a $102 million PFAS-treatment facility for contaminated groundwater. A district in that posture chasing a 600-mile-away water acquisition is doing something that might be deemed unusual.
Board VP Burke has been candid about the strategy in other venues. In an April 23 interview on the AmericaUnwon podcast, she said the board’s plan was to “explore new water sources and go big and bold,” citing as a precedent example a multi-agency ocean-desalination project at Camp Pendleton modeled at $8,300 an acre-foot. She also said the board is willing to “trade,” “exchange” or “bank” water rights to keep its customers supplied.
That’s the public face of the strategy. Trades and exchanges only buy ratepayers water if there’s existing infrastructure to move it. Between the Eel River and Riverside County, there isn’t. Which puts the energy use case back near the center of the picture.
What is Washington actually doing?
The other open question is what legal lever the Trump administration has in this fight. PG&E owns the license. FERC has jurisdiction over the surrender proceeding and the eventual decommissioning. The tribes hold (or will hold) the water rights. The State of California regulates water transfers, place of use, dam safety and water-quality certifications.
USDA’s December 19, 2025 letter to FERC and its formal notice of intervention give the administration standing to file briefs in the docket. They don’t give it authority to dictate the outcome. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins’s April 22 announcement that the Elsinore district is a “legitimate buyer” added political pressure, not legal substance, to a process that doesn’t turn on political pressure.
For an outside buyer to actually get anywhere, four things would have to be true. None is.
- PG&E has to agree to sell. It says it has not received a proposal.
- The hydropower license has to be transferable. PG&E says that path closed years ago.
- The Eel River water rights have to be available. They revert to the Round Valley Indian Tribes by binding agreement.
The Elsinore water district has to find legal authority to run a federal hydropower complex 600 miles outside its service area. California water-district statutes don’t contemplate it.
Huffman’s read of the same picture, in his April 22 statement, was less restrained. He called it “a massive water grab” and said Trump “sees this as a way to troll liberals in Northern California like me and Governor Gavin Newsom.” He pointed to the administration’s earlier statements about water — “him talking about opening a magic spigot from the Northwest that was supposed to deliver water to put out the Los Angeles fires” — and added, “Trump has shown us time and again that he has no idea how our water system works.”
Huffman announced he was opening a formal investigation. The questions, in his words: “exactly who is behind this water scheme, everyone who’s involved, and also the full scope of their scheme. And who is paying for it.” His stated goal: “to make sure that not one drop of our North Coast water is sold off and shipped to Southern California.”
Which leaves the larger question — what is the administration trying to accomplish here? A real bid that doesn’t have any of the legal pieces it would need? Or political theater aimed at a different audience?
What’s next
PG&E’s final decommissioning plan is due at FERC in July. The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors approved $500,000 in February for the Inland Water and Power Commission’s continued work on the local transition. Huffman’s investigation, Burke’s response to the questions sent Monday, and the records request for the 2018 Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District–Nevada Hydro settlement will appear in Part 2.
At Scott Dam, the gates are still open. The lake keeps draining.
This article left out one major important fact. Over 100 years ago, the government picked and choose which tribes, got water rights, leaving out many many tribes. Read the history. Potter Valley had native Americans also. Basket weaving was a learned skill by local Potter women. So doing wrong again, is like an atrocious act, again. The Pomo of Lake County should have rights, the Pomo of Mendocino county that lost a settlement to Lake Mendocino should have rights too. The people of Potter Valley in buying & settling over a couple generations, that depends on that water for their livelihood, have rights too. And Healdsburg has rights to Lake Mendocino, and Russian River businesses, have rights also. Why is everyone, but one group of Tribes left out of this water right question? 100 years of usage for livelihood does matter. The government should honor all rights. All people have rights, thats equity, that’s American, that’s why the dams, will not come down. Wildlife have rights to life, and Firefighters need water resevoirs. Because wrongs against what has been over 100 years, is the same as wrongs done to Tribes. Two wrongs don’t make, a right. My opinion is the Dams will stay, because all rights will be honored.
Potter Valley, or Lolsel, was incredibly sparsely populated by indigenous people, it was more like a church for part time living and ceremony BECAUSE Lolsel is historically one of the driest valleys in the area. YOU read a book
Is this true so Lake Pillsberry? Will no longer be there is that what I’m reading how did this pass? It’s gonna mess up potbelly so bad don’t people realize that does. Nobody have any common sense anymore it’s bullshit.
It’s hardly there as is. It’s more of a butt plug now than a dam with a lake.
What a nightmare. I mean losing Lake Pillsbury. This will be regretted for generations. SAVE LAKE PILLSBURY.
The photo you posted of the Van Arsdale dam and fish ladder are in Potter Valley, not Ukiah, as stated.
Oops, and the photo of Scott Dam is at Lake Pillsbury, not Potter Valley as written.
Huffman and his liberals are destroying a vital century-old water supply to several counties where nearly a million people, agriculture and industry now live downstream who did not exist when the dams were built. Not to mention scenic lakes and a habitat system enjoyed by many people seeking recreation. Wait until the next drought- it will be a disaster downstream! Jeral Huffman, Gavin Newsom and his Democrats are doing all of this- don’t forget it!
Exactly, those people didn’t exist, so the dam is obsolete, not worth the effort. I really wish people would settle down over this.
Idiot.
You have a major problem with reading comprehension.
This is so strange. So the Round Valley tribe is claiming immemorial rights? Isnt this the same tribe that was forced from their homeland in Chico area and forcefully marched to Covelo? The “Trail of tears” Stop the victimhood BS Stop the virtue signaling Round Valley tribes only reason for any interest in water rights is $$$$$$ and lots of it. They are looking to get rich with big payments for every drop of water diverted.
Asinine comment. It’s PG&E that is no longer willing to operate the dams. Always blame the Indians, eh?
Many unrelated tribes ended up there from all over the place. Still fighting to this day
What about the Potter Valley Pomo Tribe? They own land between the dams. Pge decides who gets paid? Dam propaganda is in fashion. This issue has more going on than they are saying. What is pge hiding? Don’t forget san bruno explosion. Pge only thinks money not maintenance. Save lake Pillsbury. Respect the Potter Valley Pomo Tribe.
Once they have a valid legal claim to the water then that strengthens a future claim to the land that makes up the watershed. Why not lay claim to everything that the rain fell on?
This is a money grad for the Round Valley Tribe. Famous for the corruption of tribal members. All in the name of river restoration. Like a previous comment. Not even original tribal residents of the valley. A hustle. 600,000 residents downstream of PV are the victims. And the tribal members will all be driving brand new Challengers and Cameros.
This important issue has more twists and turns than the entire Eel River system. To allow the water rights to bee appropriated as reported is ridiculous.
Losing Lake Pillsbury and this water source is wrong!
The East Branch of the Russian will look like the West branch in summer.
I have a question. If Lake Pillsbury is in Lake County, why are they not in any of these discussions? I guess more than 1 question. What is going to happen when there is wildfire again? We all know it’s going to happen. So, those are my questions.
I’ve been wanting to make that point. So far everyone is okay with this, but the people who’s land this inhabits? I’m from Lake County, and I say, HELL NO!
Because, pg and e, that’s why
Fascinating article and it seems likely that you are onto something here. Many questions of course, among them: Would the Elsinore district also continue operating the water diversion? If so, how much would they charge for the water, and how does that compare with what the existing users are paying now?
And how different would Lake Pillsbury look if it is operated as a battery, like San Luis Reservoir?
This article is full of outright lies. For example, the seismic reports are not public information so how can you state there is a problem. P G & E requested to not top off Lake Pillsbury. Department of Dam Safety went along with it.
Shouldn’t the Dept of Dam Safety be in charge of whether Scott Dam is safe for operation? In my opinion, it
appears that P G & E doesn’t want to provide manpower to monitor and man the gates.
The real reason PG & E wants out of the PVP is because of the cost for all the BS studies that keep coming, cost for the latest fish scream diversion structure and doing everything the environmentalists want and yet never enough! As much as I dislike PG&E for how they have handled the PVP, I don’t blame them for wanting to walk away.
Just tell us the facts and the truth please.
I agree with everything you said
Riverside county needs to figure out their population problems and stop building housing in a desert. The planet needs these rivers to flow to create equilibrium.
Tell Palm springs and Disney to stop building if they don’t have their own water which they have under Mount San jacinto.
George,
PGE walked away because they did not want to pay 10 million dollars to replace their own defective transformer, please re-read the article.
There are always a couple of key facts left out of the Pillsbury discussion.
The first was mentioned in an earlier comment. Lake Pillsbury is entirely within Lake County. Yet they were completely excluded from the planning groups.
The second is that Lake Pillsbury sits entirely on Federal Land (Mendocino National Forest). Of course the federal government should be involved determining what happens.
Anyone who has lived in this region for any amount of time knows that the water supply becomes very scarce in drought years.
The state has mandated a huge building boom, but there is no increased water supply.
The answer is to eliminate a significant amount of precious, stored water??
This dam removal proposal seems nearly criminal. We already do not have enough stored water supply.
Does the Dam need some maintenance? That would be expected, not shocking. Does the lake require some dredging? Perhaps.
The correct answer is not to take it all away. Repair it, and preserve the crucial water storage. It is likely cheaper to repair it than eliminate it.
Fewer illegal water diversions on the Eel would probably help the river quite a bit. Don’t take away a lake to make up for that.
Pillsbury sits nearly at the headwaters of the Eel, which is an extensive river system.
The salmon might gain a tiny bit, but it would come at the expense of all people who require water In the area. There must be sensible trade-offs made. Eliminating the dam is not sensible. Simple as that.
It’s a crooked deal, primarily driven by special interest groups.
It is simply not in the best interest of most people. Of course we will have another drought period. Climate change, right? We need every drop.
The Mendocino Dam will never get raised. It would be unaffordable and resisted by many groups. It’s not going to happen. The state is already out of money.
That proposal is nothing but a Red Herring promoted by Representative Huff and Puff.
He is not serving his constituents, it’s a complete sellout. Who is he getting donations from??
We need water. We always need water. Duh
Fact: When the transformer was taken off-line in 2021, PG&E said it planned to repair it at a cost of about $2.5 million, which they felt would be recovered by hydro production in 5 to 7 years. Then, poof, they changed their minds. No doubt political pressure to get on board with “the plan.”
So far everyone is okay with this, but the people who’s land this inhabits? I’m from Lake County, and I say, HELL NO!
Roy-I’m with you!
All this whining from people who don’t pay for this dam. Lake, Mendo, and Sonoma County are lucky to have had the dam for this long and it didn’t cost the locals a dime for over a century. Wake up and smell the bills are coming due.
It is my understanding that the tunnel is located in between Van Arsdale Reservoir and the Potter Valley Powerhouse. The powerhouse turbine releases directly into the East Fork of the Russian and contains no afterbay to store water for a pumped-storage facility. The author seems to think the head difference between Lake Pillsbury and Potter Valley is the appeal here, claiming that the district’s previous plans to build a pumped storage facility elsewhere were foiled by lack of a lake, whereas this project already has a lake. There is absolutely no infrastructure here to pump water back into the Lake, there’s an 8 mile long mostly innaccesible canyon between Van Arsdale res and Lake Pillsbury that drops several hundred feet.
In order to pump water back through the diversion tunnel, a new lake for storage would have to be built in Potter Valley. This isn’t entirely unfeasible to assume, but the writer here doesn’t seem to have an accurate picture of the terrain and facilities involved.
The above mentioned 8 mile canyon could support whitewater recreation should the dam be repaired and dredged. Scheduled weekend releases of 600cfs are suitable for the class three rapids and, if managed properly, Lake Pillsbury could still have boating and recreation. Before the lake’s capacity was diminished by sediment, state order, and drought, the lake often released sufficient dry season flows for rafting and kayaking through this canyon but nobody knew about it and it was done intermittently.
Most of the people I see up up near the lake are coming to use their off road vehicles and camp in the forest, I never see many boat trailers on this road. Scheduled whitewater recreation would be a boon to the area and I personally know people in the Round Valley Tribe (which BTW is within the middle fork Eel watershed, not the main fork above Pillsbury) who would love to kickstart a rafting industry on the Eel, especially for the younger members of the tribe.
With the removal of Scott Dam, the roadside section of the main Eel along hwy 162 (Covelo Rd.) was going to have a more reliable spring season for rafting and kayaking due to the added flow from headwaters snowmelt that was normally held behind the dam on April 1 when they used to raise the spillway gates to fill the lake. The same was true for the section in between Lake Pillsbury and Van Arsdale. Dam removal was going to provide longer spring flows on these excellent whitewater runs of intermediate ability, both with great access and close to the amenities of Ukiah and Willits.
If Scott Dam should remain, for reasons outside of local control, it’s important to remember that whitewater and recreational flows are part of any FERC license with a long history of legal precedent and they are a great tool that all stakeholders can use to ensure that water remains in the river that nature intended it for.
I can’t help wondering if the Lake Elsinore involvement is somehow related to the meeting between Supervisors Cline and Norvell with Trump Dept of Ag officials a few months ago. Cline’s position still appears to be trying to stop the dams removal that is at odds with the position of the Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission on which she serves.
It is absolutely connected! There’s a good chance that there was discussion about this whole thing but Cline and Norvell just lied and said nothing happened. A reporter might be able to find out what happened at the national farm bureau conference.
With the fact that this state is lacking in water storage, here we go, knocking down another dam. Besides the fact that PG&E wants out, due to the expense, supposedly. I’m afraid that I still blame this on the environmentalists. Who have brought this state to the brink with their edicts, and destroying more dams is their plan. Their plans don’t include the protection of those that live on the lands. Their plans don’t care that generations of Potter Valley residents will suffer from the removal of these dams, the importance of water storage that during the often droughts that occur doesn’t enter into the conversation. Their worry? As usual, it’s the fish of the world. Just like they turned off the water to the valley, and the farmers, because of a fish, that wasn’t even native. Hopefully, a plan will come and common sense will reign. One wonders who is going to profit from the removal?
….One reason we’re in this fix is we stole the land from the Indigenous Tribes in the first place, thanks to our white faced predator’s greedy paternalistic ways (I’m white too, but not so greedy as folks that think they own the place). It’s the corner we’ve painted ourselves into!….
We didn’t steal, we conquered and purchased the land.
There’s a movement to take down ALL dams and an incredible amount of financial pressure to do so from environmentalists within and outside of F&W etc. I don’t hear much differentiation between dams. Just dams = bad. It’s like a fundamentally religious chant. I don’t see much critical thinking.
IDK how that’s going to work out for salmonoids in drought years.. There is a much larger human population than there was 100 years ago and a very different way of sourcing food etc. It takes more water at a local level, even if some food sources become no longer local. Like it or not we all pretty much rely on a lifestyle that uses a lot more water now.
I have absolutely no stake in this whatsoever. It looks like a bad short sighted idea to me. I suspect the real reason the dam is coming down is lack of funds and financial incentive to repair it.
This whole situation will continue to be a beacon of hope for the people of potter valley until Keely Covello and Supervisor Cline and the rest of the republicans stop lying about how many people are served and will be served by the diversion and dams remaining as is. There’s no way that 600K people are in need of that water. Lake Pilsbury is a swamp. It’s silted out and filling the reservoir. The Van Arsdale part is in the ass end of nowhere and way too expensive to manage. Are we surprised they don’t want to run a max 9 megawatt generator on the eel river? Read up on how much money the army corps spends on coyote dam annually. PG&E runs Diablo Canyon. That’s 2000+ megawatts. Do they need a dinky little electric generator that’s really a giant liability? Are the potter valley hay growers prepared to pay $600/AF? The Elsinore Valley folks will do their math and disappear with all the phone numbers blocked after they figure out the truth. The best idea for everyone is to do what the wineries have done and start digging ponds in PV. Stay in contact with NRCS. Everyone is trying to push past the little guy at the NRCS desk and beg mommy Rollins and daddy Trumps for help but those little guys at the desks are the most knowledgeable. Do groundwater surveys. Pool your resources and dig community pools. Cover them with those plastic shade balls to reduce evaporation and keep the ducks out. Start thinking conservation. Stop the lies that favor a narrative of republicans being marginalized for ngo politics.