Huffman demands disclosure on Potter Valley takeover plan, Eel River exports

Jared Huffman said the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District has not been clear about what it wants to do with the Potter Valley Project, and he opened an investigation into the Trump administration’s role in the fight over Eel River water. The Humboldt Democrat sent letters to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and the district, demanding records on meetings, proposals, financing arrangements, and any plan to connect Eel or Russian River water to state or federal water projects.

Huffman said Humboldt and other North Coast communities deserve a “clear and complete accounting” before any takeover plan moves forward. He also pressed for answers about whether the district, which he said is hundreds of miles outside the Eel River basin and has no connection to it, has explored old diversion concepts tied to Dos Rios Dam, the North Bay Aqueduct, or the Richmond Bridge pipeline.

The stakes reach far beyond one hydro project. Humboldt County says Potter Valley diversions alter the natural flow regime of the Eel River, affect fish passage and habitat, and can reduce recharge of interconnected alluvial aquifers. That means the fight could shape river flows, salmon and steelhead habitat, tribal water interests, farm supplies, and what local ratepayers ultimately pay for a system built to move North Coast water south.

The conflict now collides with a different plan that state officials and regional partners put forward in February 2025. That agreement said it would secure water reliability for 600,000 or more coastal Californians while restoring the Eel River, after PG&E first announced in 2019 that it would remove the century-old Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam because they are outdated and seismically at risk. The same agreement said removing the dams would reopen almost 300 miles of upper Eel River habitat after nearly 120 years of diversions from the Eel watershed into the Russian River watershed.

Humboldt County backed that direction in July 2025 when supervisors approved a water diversion agreement tied to dam removal and a new diversion facility. The Eel-Russian Project Authority, created at the end of 2023, has been negotiating with PG&E over the project’s surrender. Its board includes the Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission, Sonoma Water, Sonoma County, and the Round Valley Indian Tribes.

PG&E has said it met with the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District early this year, but it has not received a proposal to buy the project. Rollins, meanwhile, said the district had expressed strong interest in purchasing it and keeping the dams in place, a prospect that would preserve the machinery for continued exports and could upend the North Coast coalition that has spent years lining up around dam removal.