Setting the record straight: Inviting Trump to interfere with the Potter Valley Project—An Op-Ed

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Our community – in a larger sense than perhaps many of us first imagine – is facing an existential question regarding our future water security. This question is being posed,  not at our own initiative or design, but by circumstance. As many of us may know, even though we may not all fully apprehend its consequences, PG&E is surrendering the Potter  Valley Project. How we will answer the only question that really matters will require the best from each of us.  

Years ago, my grandmother, a remarkable woman of deep faith, encouraged me to  pursue an education and to “never stop learning, Philip.” In a note that is now tucked into her old Bible on my bookshelf, she observed six virtues of knowledge. The first counseled  that the honest pursuit of knowledge would allow me to “detect and confront error.” What follows is just that.  

For over 120 years, the entire Russian River watershed, from Potter Valley to Jenner, has directly benefited from PG&E’s storage, release, and diversion of Eel River water into the Russian River watershed. Once those waters met PG&E’s uses, partly for hydropower,  and landed in the Russian River watershed, it was considered abandoned flow under  California water law. Many of us – almost all of us – perfected appropriative water rights predicated on these foreign waters. Those of us relying on those waters have no right to insist on PG&E continuing to provide them. When they are gone, our appropriative water rights to that water are inchoate.  

In anticipation of PG&E’s surrender of the Potter Valley Project, with tremendous foresight, decades ago certain leaders took steps to ensure our community would be well-positioned to meet this moment and created the Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission. We are all better for their efforts. Recently, those of us who find ourselves having inherited their vision have been laboring – and labor is the proper term  here – to secure the most favorable terms the reality of our circumstances permit. One result of those labors is a memorandum of understanding between IWPC, Sonoma Water, the Round Valley Indian Tribes, California Fish and Wildlife, Humboldt County, and environmental groups on the Eel River. This MOU secures our ability to divert Eel River water for up to fifty years, and, more importantly, establishes a regime – constructs a framework – creates an ecosystem – that allows us to build on that success and that partnership for our longer-term collective water security. Given the circumstances, this is, I earnestly counsel, our only true imperative when it comes to the Potter Valley Project. 

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On April 4, 2025, the Mendocino, Sonoma, Lake, and Marin County Farm Bureaus published an open letter to President Donald J. Trump and his kakistocracy. The letter denigrates the elegant, durable solution the MOU frames out, complaining that the group that negotiated the MOU did not invite the signatories to bless it with their extensive knowledge and expertise in these matters. The letter goes so far to invite President Trump to sabotage PG&E’s decommissioning plan – a plan which includes the continued diversion of water into the Russian, and, instead, urges the Bureau of Reclamation to assume ownership and responsibility for the Potter Valley Project.  

I detect three primary errors in the letter and offer them for our due consideration,  believing that by confronting them head-on we may avoid the communal immolation the letter tempts us toward.  

The first is the energy behind the letter – what is an injudicious and imprudent yielding to fear. This energy is expressed in two distinct ways. First, my good reader, if one has to publish an open letter to the President of the United States and a significant portion of his Cabinet, then one simply does not have the juice –the experience–wherewithal–required to be heard otherwise. Now, in our history there have been populations that have had to resort to this tactic – women, African-Americans, homosexuals, immigrants – because they have been institutionally disenfranchised. These are hardly those circumstances. Second, this is simply not how one develops or even affects a major water project. One should know to pick up the phone or send an email to the correct person requesting the kind of discrete, focused, and informed meeting where these types of issues are thoughtfully addressed. The letter betrays a fundamental misconception of how to get important things – like our future water security – done in the real world. 

I believe fear explains the tactic. Unfortunately, however, it does not excuse it. We are all afraid – some of us are simply refusing to yield to it. In these times, it will be a quiet courage and an unyielding (though not naïve) faith that count.  

Second, while the letter rightly acknowledges the fundamental importance of  continued Eel River diversions, it simultaneously “urges” the President to prevent FERC  (how to do so within the bounds of our Constitution is not clear) from approving PG&E’s  decommissioning plan – the very plan that provides for those continued diversions. 

Compounding the incoherence of its stated policy preference, the letter is uninformed by facts and circumstances. The facts include that PG&E owns the assets of the Potter Valley Project, including Scott Dam, Cape Horn Dam, the associated infrastructure, and the water rights. It’s PG&E’s stuff, folks, and we simply do not get to dictate to them what to do with it. That’s how things like the 5^th and 14^th Amendments work. 

The circumstances include elements in Humboldt County, including environmental groups, which insist on Scott Dam coming down and do not seem to care whether there is  any continued diversion at all. These folks include extraordinarily litigious and well-financed elements like Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman’s Association. The letter insinuates we did not fight hard enough – that we somehow, for some reason – an absence of courage or conviction, perhaps? – yielded to these elements. Here I am not being defensive nor am I engaging in apologetics – I simply know what Herculean effort has gone into this to get us this far. As an infantryman who fought in Iraq, I am far too used to those who stayed out of the fight criticize those who fought. This blemish on human nature and manly virtue is nothing new – it is, however, no less tiresome.  

The prudent course required that we ask how best to deal with these energies. As much as they may insult our own legitimate interests in water, these competing energies  are an important variable in any calculus that leads to any real and enduring solution. Rather than counsel the prudent path, the letter beckons us, Siren-like, to return the insult as if their interests were somehow necessarily subordinate to our own. This potential future only guarantees conflict. This potential future only results in tragedy – tragic because the  resulting catastrophe will have been of our own making. 

This regime of conflict is the governing regime in other areas of the state – I counsel my neighbors in the strongest possible terms to avoid that future. It is a future where executive directors, engineers, consultants, and, yes, lawyers, make boatloads of money and guarantee perpetual employment in the Sisyphean task of endlessly fighting over every drop of water while the end user – the family trying to buy a home, the irrigator, the harvester, the business owner, the kid at the park – suffers.  

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The current path is a path toward a future where competing interests to Eel River water are recognized and provided for and which is the best guarantor of our collective water security. Thus the letter is as ill-conceived as it is uninformed by reality.  

Finally, in the crescendo of its folly, the letter “urges” Reclamation to assume ownership and responsibility of the Potter Valley Project, citing Reclamation’s expertise in  federal water management and dam operations as “the best path forward.” Perhaps. One wonders whether the authors are familiar with Reclamation’s cost allocation policies, and with the fact that, yes, Reclamation does do large water projects – and does them rather well – but it does not do so for free. In fact, the cost of providing what would be federal project water, both in capital obligations and any attending water service or repayment contract terms, would exceed by several factors the likely cost of the present course the  MOU provides. It would certainly be entire orders of magnitude more costly than the rates currently paid by our friends and neighbors in Potter Valley. Once again, one need only cast one’s eyes and mind beyond the borders of Mendocino County or read something other than social media to understand the significant cost implications of Reclamation operating a future water project. This the letter does not even begin to address.  

To beat the horse dead, the letter also fails to grasp the structural realities that Reclamation and its water contractors and end users regularly deal with. Reclamation does not operate in an administrative vacuum. As a bureau in the Department of Interior, its sister agencies, notably U.S. Fish and Wildlife, are able to influence decisions made at the policy level that manifest themselves in decreased water reliability – those of us who work in this arena describe it as a one-way knob. Furthermore – and under the critical, well financed eye of those who are currently our allies but who would now be our outright opponents – Reclamation’s every action would be subject to indefatigable challenge under the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Clean Water  Act, not to mention the tome that is Federal Reclamation Law, which is itself, as the Central  Valley Project experienced in1992, subject to “improvement” based on national politics.  These constraints would very likely lead our home to operate under the same constant water insecurity as our neighbors, for example, south of the Delta, where, for the third year in a row, and after the third year of record or near-record precipitation, can count on only receiving perhaps 40% of what their contracts with Reclamation provide. Bear in mind they pay for 100%, regardless of the allocation.  

The only thing the letter manages to get right is that we must raise and modernize  Coyote Valley Dam. And here when I say “we” I mean Mendocino County. The greater Ukiah  Valley’s water future is entirely dependent on accomplishing this. Anything – any effort, any talking point, any other interest–that distracts from our ability to recover from the grave mistake our forebears made 70 years ago must be unapologetically treated as a clear and present danger to our collective water security. It’s just math, folks, plain and simple – it’s addition and subtraction. Tens of thousands of acre-feet of water will come. We must have somewhere to put it. Right now we do not. 

An ill-conceived idea, born of fear and animated by a lack of information about the  relevant facts, circumstances, and law – essentially concocting an alternate reality – results in something that is as unwise as it is existentially dangerous. It may seem harsh to offer these observations in public – much rather would I have had this discussion in private with my friends and neighbors in Mendocino County Farm Bureau leadership. With all my heart,I hoped the letter would go quietly into the night. But the public repetition of the letter’s existence, pleas, and substance, such as it is, unfortunately, demands a public rebuttal given the gravity of the sin. My sincere and earnest hope is that my offering will counsel more thoughtful, constructive, and informed participation from men and women of  the requisite moral fiber to meet the moment.  

Error, undetected and unconfronted, can pervert the truth and – worse – undermine  our belief in and paralyze our pursuit of the truth. These times do indeed demand the best  from each of us – I suggest we now have a glimpse of what the worst looks like and that,  from this thalweg, we have nowhere to go but up. 

Philip A. Williams lives just outside Ukiah; a former infantryman with two tours in Iraq, he is a registered Republican and holds a Master’s in Public Administration, a Juris Doctor, and a Master of Laws in water; he has been practicing water law across the state for over ten years, with significant experience in major federal water projects and Reclamation law, very much of which has been spent defending and advocating for California agriculture. He dedicates this writing to his children and their friends, whose future home he is wholly and unapologetically committed to securing.

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