What’s Behind The Cline Appointment Flap?

We were disappointed by Mendocino Voice reporter Sydney Fishman’s coverage of the Supervisors’ discussion of whether First District Supervisor Madeline Cline should be removed as the Board’s appointee to the Inland Water and Power Commission. Ms. Fishman described the discussion and the appointment debate, but didn’t get into the underlying controversy.

Several readers have asked us to try to explain the dispute, so despite being a couple of valleys removed from the affected areas of the County, here’s our take on the question of whether Ms. Cline should represent the County on the Inland Water and Power Commission, and why the issue is getting as much attention as it is.

As we have noted before, part of the problem is the political aspect. Conservatives, Republicans and Trumpers, mostly in conservative Potter Valley, prefer to keep the dams. Liberals and Democrats tend to favor the dam removal. The liberals don’t like Ms. Cline associating herself with the Trump administration, while Ms. Cline insists her views are not political, she’s only trying to represent her constituents, not anyone’s political views.

There are two distinct affected groups: Residents of Potter Valley, and residents on the Eel River who are downstream of the dams (some of whom live in Haschak’s Third District and some of whom are in Humboldt County).

PG&E owns and operates the dams, but they have concluded that the dams are structurally unsound and, since they no longer produce the power they were originally built for, PG&E wants to abandon them. Nobody seems to have the wherewithal to take them over from PG&E. PG&E has stated that the dams’ structural problems make them vulnerable to failure which would make them potentially liable for downstream damage that might result from failure.

A fragile “agreement” has been reached some call the “two basin solution” (i.e., Potter Valley/Russian River and the Middle Fork of the Eel River) that if the dams are removed, the feds will fund a pumping/plumbing arrangement that would continue to divert water from the Eel during winter flows. But that post-dam-replacement diversion would bypass Potter Valley and flow directly into Lake Mendocino and on to the water’s primary owner, the Sonoma County Water Agency which makes big bucks selling it to residential and commercial customers in Sonoma and Marin Counties.

So, on the one hand, Potter Valley ranchers and grape growers fear that if the dams go away, they won’t have enough water during the dry summer months to continue doing what they now do. On the other hand, if the dams remain, there’s a chance that the dams fail and endanger people downstream with a barrage of water and silt. Advocates for dam removal also insist that native fish populations will improve if the dams are no longer blocking the Middle Fork of the Eel. (There are other issues, of course, too many to list here.)

Supervisors Cline and Bernie Norvell (Republicans) apparently believe that the dams should not be removed until or unless some storage accommodation is made to keep Potter Valley from going dry in the summer. Supervisors Haschak, Mulheren and Williams are on record saying that dam removal is inevitable and that everybody should accept that fact. (They also agree that Potter Valley should get some water storage relief, but that dam removal should not be contingent on relief for Potter Valley.)

Adequate water storage for Potter Valley is estimated to cost hundreds of millions of dollars and no one knows where that additional money could come from. And, given California’s byzantine environmental and construction requirements the storage options that the technical people have described could take decades.

Which brings us back to the question of whether Ms. Cline should be on the Inland Water and Power Commission whose stated mission is “protecting the water supply for Mendocino County families, fish and farms.”). Critics of the Cline appointment think she might maneuver to delay the decommissioning of the dams and thus endanger the residents on the downstream side of the dams. Supporters of Cline’s appointment say she’s smart and capable and she represents the First District which would be most affected by the dam removal. Cline herself says that she would resign from the Commission if she was she was put in a position of having to choose between Potter Valley and the County’s interests (as expressed by the Haschak-Mulheren-Williams/Democrat majority).

Strategically, Mendo and the Inland Water and Power Commission should try to retain some leverage with the feds to get some big bucks for Potter Valley storage by withholding agreement on dam removal until the feds come up with some storage money. Cline would seem to be the right choice for that angle.

But the probabilities and realities are that PG&E will proceed with abandonment and dam removal, albeit slowly, no matter who is on the Inland Water and Power Commission.

Meanwhile, all it would take would be one decent earthquake in the area to rupture one or both of the dams in question.