Rollins meets with Potter Valley residents, vows to fight for their water

She is taking a stand against Governor Gavin Newsom's prioritization of "fish over people."

Rollins met with ranchers and farmers who will be affected by the removal of the Potter Valley Project. In a tweet several days later, she

Thursday, September 4, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins met with about a half dozen stakeholders local to the Potter Valley Project, a hydroelectric plant in Northern California slated for removal.

Through my reporting at UNWON I’ve connected with leaders in the Trump administration and was honored to help coordinate the meeting by organizing a non-partisan coalition of local leaders, farmers, ranchers, and business owners to meet with Secretary Rollins. These individuals discussed the future of the Potter Valley Project, the devastation its removal would have on the region, and the inadequacy of proposed alternative solutions including the so-called “Two-Basin Solution.”

The following Sunday evening, Secretary Rollins posted a message to her X account in support of the effort to protect this water supply, which is vital to thousands of generational farms and ranches in Northern California:

Around 600,000 Northern Californians rely on water from the Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E)-owned project, which includes two dams and a diversion tunnel that stores a minor percentage of water from the Eel River during the region’s high-rain winter season. Some water is diverted to the Russian River watershed, the rest back to the Eel River. These diversions are provided during the summer months when the region would otherwise have no water. Farms, ranches, and residents from Potter Valley to Marin County have come to rely on this vital water storage.

Pleas from locals asking California politicians, including Representative Jared Huffman and Governor Gavin Newsom, to preserve the dam have fallen on deaf ears. Newsom has been a vocal advocate of dam removal, naming dam removal as part of his salmon restoration “strategy” and specifically promising to “complete an agreement” to remove the Potter Valley Project.

Yet in response to Rollins’ X post supporting Potter Valley’s farmers and ranchers, Newsom’s office feigned ignorance and insulted the Secretary’s intelligence. Spokesperson Tara Gallegos told SFGate Rollins “doesn’t understand that PG&E is a private company owned by shareholders, not the Governor or the legislature. Once she learns how Google works, she should reach out to PG&E.”

One wonders why, then, Newsom was in the press last year “promising” to remove the Potter Valley Project.

Gallegos also failed to mention that, while PG&E not be owned by the Governor or the legislature, it is in fact regulated by Newsom’s hand-selected appointees at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). PG&E is a state-regulated monopoly.

Huffman, on the other hand, appeared to undermine Team Newsom’s efforts at neutrality by providing lengthy commentary to various media outlets in which he vigorously defended dam removal.

“The dam is so dilapidated that it can’t operate in the normal way,” Huffman told Lost Coast Outpost. “So the answer to water supply reliability is the new fish-friendly diversion that our coalition has supported and that PG&E is including in its decommissioning plan.”

But a 2023 report from the California Division of Dam Safety, made public for the first time by UNWON, shows that the dams have been rated safe for continued use—in direct contrast with Huffman and PG&E’s repeated insistence that the dams are “crumbling” and present a “seismic risk.”

And locals explained to USDA leaders on the Zoom call with Rollins that the planned “diversion” referenced by Huffman does not include any storage facilities and would only divert water during the rainy season when the river is already at flood stage. This plan is not only unhelpful, they argue, it is actively harmful—putting Russian River communities at great flood risk. They say this plan is merely a tactic to silence opposition to dam removal, which is a pre-ordained environmentalist endeavor that puts “fish over people” as Rollins identified.

Advocates on the call say the federal government is their last remaining hope to save their water, and the region.

PG&E submitted a final dam surrender application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in late July. FERC is now in the process of considering the request. The DOI has also signaled interest in intervening in the dam removal.