The Potter Valley Project, which dams Northern California’s Eel River, isn’t doing very much right now. Its reservoir is clogged with sediment, and drought often empties it out. The project once supported a hydroelectric power plant that could produce about 9 megawatts of electricity, which is about 1 percent of a typical fossil-fuel-fired plant, but it has not worked in years. Plus, some of its infrastructure may be at risk of collapsing during an earthquake. Like thousands of other small dams across the U.S., it is now more trouble than it’s worth. That’s why the utility that owns the project, Pacific Gas and Electric, moved last year to demolish it and undam the river. PG&E has wanted to abandon the project for decades, but a final removal agreement required years of careful negotiation. The dam project currently supplies water to vineyards and cities in Sonoma County, and it’s the sole water source for the rural farm community of Potter Valley. The final agreement was a delicate compromise: The Round Valley Indian Tribe, which has senior rights to water from the Eel, agreed to let some water flow from the river to farmers through a diversion tunnel, and the farmers agreed to accept about half the water they had received in past years when the reservoir was full. Supporters say that dam removal will restore natural water flow for vulnerable fish that have long inhabited the river. But now, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins appears determined to blow up the deal. An aerial view of the Potter Valley Project. Kyle Schwartz / CalTrout The longtime ally of President Trump has joined a small group of local residents in mounting a public campaign against the deal. She may well succeed — she’s already identified an obscure Southern California water agency that suggests it’s open to taking control of the dams. The intervention is just the latest in a series of efforts by Rollins to turn conservation issues into culture-war fodder. Under her leadership, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, has targeted federal funding for sustainable farming practices as well as programs that broaden farmers’ access to USDA support — terminating billions of dollars worth of grants on the grounds that such initiatives are what Rollins has called ‘woke’ holdovers from the Biden administration. Supporters of dam removal have reacted to Rollins’s intervention with incredulity. ‘It’s not really even the federal government [opposing the agreement]. It’s a couple of MAGA extremists who happen to be government actors,’ said U.S. Representative Jared Huffman, a Democrat who represents the area in Congress. ‘It’s sort of political theater masked as some sort of policy move that purports to be about taking over and operating this project, which is pretty preposterous.’ Rollins’s attempt to derail the Potter Valley deal has thrown the region’s future into question. Without an agreement, the Eel River and its surrounding environment will likely continue to deteriorate. The Round Valley tribe could sue to claim its senior rights over the river’s water, leading to prolonged litigation that could jeopardize water availability for nearby farms and cities. And water deliveries from the degraded reservoir will likely continue to be meager. More broadly, the development threatens a recent trend of negotiation and compromise in vulnerable watersheds across the country. The Potter Valley project is the latest in a series of dam removal agreements, from the Juniata River in Pennsylvania to the massive Klamath River dam removal on the California-Oregon border. These bipartisan agreements are fragile even in the best of times, but by politicizing the issue, Rollins may have made a permanent truce impossible. Even though many farmers who receive water from the Potter Valley Project support the dam removal agreement, there are many local landowners and conservative residents who oppose it. One of the most vocal is a ranch-animal veterinarian named Rich Brazil, who lives in the small town of Potter Valley, just south of the main project dam. Brazil’s daughter, Keely Brazil Covello, is a filmmaker who writes a blog called America Unwon that advocates for farmers and ranchers. Her blog, which is ranked 44th on Substack’s ‘Climate & Environment’ leaderboard, has publicized the perceived downsides of the deal and framed it as an existential threat to Potter Valley. ‘This will change the face of that area,’ said Covello, who now lives in Southern California. ‘People need to know what’s happening.’ After PG&E secured the dam removal deal, Covello began writing frequently about the deal. In early September, Rollins retweeted one of Covello’s posts about Potter Valley with the caption, ‘I’m on it.’ That month, Covello and her father helped organize a letter addressed to Rollins and seven other leaders in the Trump administration that urged the officials to reject the agreement as ‘inadequate, noncompliant with federal law, and dismissive of community and environmental consequences.’ Rollins and Covello later engaged in what appeared to be a coordinated messaging campaign about the dam removal effort. In the following months, Rollins held a series of meetings with Covello, Rich Brazil, and other local dam removal opponents, and posted to social media about how the state legislature and Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom are putting ‘fish over people’ — a standard attack line used on environmental activists in California. In December, Rollins published a letter to the editor in a local newspaper, The Mendocino Voice, condemning the dam removal effort for its threat to farmers and ranchers in the region. Later that month, the agriculture secretary also filed a notice to intervene in the project proceedings as well as comments to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, the nation’s independent dam regulator, requesting that the commission suspend PG&E’s formal request to surrender its license for the dams. ‘If this plan goes through as proposed, it will devastate hundreds of family farms and wipe out more than a century of agricultural tradition in Potter Valley,’ said Rollins in a statement. ‘This plan would put countless USDA investments at risk and leave families even more vulnerable to drought and wildfire.’ Multiple current and former USDA staffers and officials told Grist that the USDA’s arguments in its request to FERC appear to omit the conservation and environmental priorities of the agency’s mission areas. In it, the agency argued that the dam decommissioning would cause adverse impacts to many of USDA’s mission areas, claiming impacts across five of the USDA’s subagencies, including the U.S. Forest Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins delivers remarks to farmers from the Truman balcony of the White House as President Donald Trump looks on in Washington, D.C. Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images Erin Foster West, a former NRCS staffer who is now executive programs director at the National Young Farmers Coalition, said that while the NRCS and Forest Service have historically managed and worked to support very small dams, the Potter Valley Project appears to have no obvious connection to USDA’s operations. Gloria Montaño Greene, who served as deputy undersecretary of the USDA’s Farm Production and Conservation mission area during the Biden administration and was involved with the Klamath Dam removal, said these processes typically unfold very differently than the administration’s current approach — slowly, across multiple administrations, with a wide range of stakeholders at the table. The USDA’s public intervention here, she suggested, looks nothing like that. ‘What’s the NRCS saying? What’s the state of California saying? What are the tribal leads for the area saying? There are many voices in the conversation,’ she said. Answers to these questions have remained elusive, and the story has only gotten stranger. Covello, Brazil, and the other dam removal opponents met with USDA officials in January at the Farm Bureau convention in Anaheim and in Washington, D.C., a month later. Then, in late April, Rollins announced that an entity had emerged to buy the dams from PG&E: the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, a water service provider some 500 miles away in Riverside County. A member of the Elsinore Valley board appeared on Covello’s podcast and declared her ambition to take over the dams, framing it as an altruistic gesture that will protect water supply for all Californians. ‘All of California benefits when there’s water and all of California is harmed when there’s not,’ Burke told Grist when asked why she wanted to acquire the project. She admitted that ‘there might be no benefit’ to her district and said that ‘we are just interested and doing our due diligence.’ Burke added that she first learned about the dam removal deal when she read an X post from Chad Bianco, the Riverside County sheriff who is running for governor as a Republican. Policymakers and environmentalists have blasted Elsinore Valley’s involvement as at best a political stunt and at worst a plan to siphon water from Northern California and deliver it farther south. There is no infrastructure that could convey water from Potter Valley down to Elsinore Valley, making a direct water transfer physically impossible, but that has not quelled suspicions. Huffman’s office has begun a formal investigation into Elsinore’s involvement. For Rollins, the political frenzy around the dam removal may be part of the point, according to Alicia Hamann, executive director of the environmental advocacy organization Friends of the Eel River. ‘The involvement of this water district, nearly 600 miles away from the project, with no tangible connection to the power or the water associated with the project, is really bizarre,’ said Hamann. She suspects that the administration could be using the case to appeal to farmers ahead of November’s midterm elections. Farmers, despite voting overwhelmingly for the GOP, have been increasingly dissatisfied with the administration’s trade policies and geopolitical conflicts roiling America’s farm economy. In response to inquiries from Grist, a USDA spokesperson reiterated Rollins’s position, saying that dam removal ‘is expected to create severe, lasting consequences for the region’s agricultural producers and surrounding communities.’ The spokesperson added that removing the dams would harm water quality and compromise drinking water supplies, reduce firefighting capacity, and put groundwater wells at risk ‘while jeopardizing substantial USDA investments tied to loans, insurance programs, conservation work, and rural development.’ The spokesperson also pointed to other ‘unresolved issues’ but did not clarify them. Rollins’s intervention has fractured the delicate consensus around the dam removal agreement, but no one involved seems to have any clue what will happen next. PG&E’s proposal to decommission the dams is still pending before FERC, and neither USDA nor Elsinore Valley has submitted a formal proposal to take them over. In the meantime, the two sides of the debate have begun to exchange legal barbs. Friends of the Eel River and other environmental organizations submitted a public records request to the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District on May 5. The request, a copy of which was shared with Grist, cites concerns that the water district’s decision to explore purchasing the dams from PG&E violates the Brown Act, a California law that requires local legislative bodies to conduct their business in public. Elsinore Valley appears to be pushing back. That same week, the water district and the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank cofounded by Rollins herself in 2021, began to file a torrent of their own public records requests to organizations that were involved in dam removal talks. While some of these were governmental agencies that are legally required to respond to such requests, others were private sector actors that are typically not subject to the law, like the conservation nonprofit CalTrout. The request to CalTrout, a copy of which was shared with Grist, sought all electronic communications concerning the Potter Valley Project; all records, internal documents, and funding applications; and all communications shared with a variety of related entities and agencies. ‘We are not a public agency. So we were really confused we got it,’ said Charlie Schneider, a project lead at the nonprofit. ‘What are they even after is hard to understand, right?’ Just days later, however, the America First Policy Institute rescinded its request. (The Institute declined to respond to a request for comment, instead directing Grist to the nonprofit’s public comment submitted to FERC opposing the dam removal.) The most important local player in the Potter Valley conflict is the Round Valley Indian Tribe, which has senior rights to the water from the Eel River, meaning it could, in theory, assert a claim to the water that farmers and cities who rely on the Potter Valley Project are now using. The tribe has been pushing dam removal for generations, and the PG&E agreement was only possible thanks to their cooperation. They will allow farmers who got water from the dams to receive some of their Eel River water through a new diversion tunnel, and in exchange, the farmers will give the tribe money for ecosystem restoration. Read Next How the Klamath Dams Came Down Anita Hofschneider & Jake Bittle In an interview with Grist, tribal president Joseph Parker vowed to claim his tribe’s water rights if USDA continued to block the removal deal. This would mean a lengthy adjudication of the Eel River’s water rights, which could block Elsinore or any farmers downstream from taking water from the dams even if they did stay in place. ‘We talked to USDA, we told them our story, and they listened, but you could tell they didn’t want to listen,’ said Parker. ‘[The farmers] have been getting free water this whole hundred-plus years. Hopefully they know that we aren’t backing down and that we’re here for the long fight.’ The tribe has addressed letters to both Rollins and Elsinore warning them about ‘the potential liabilities that any successor owner of these dams will likely face, and the resolve of our people to oppose their retention.’ Meanwhile, locals who have come to support the agreement argue that there’s no alternative to dam removal now that PG&E has decided to offload the project. ‘If anybody had asked me ten years ago what would happen if [the Project] was gone I would have said it would be disastrous,’ said Janet Pauli, a grape and hay farmer who is one of Potter Valley’s largest landowners and the head of the irrigation district representing most of the area’s farmers. ‘But that was then, and this is now.’ Pauli helped secure the 2025 agreement in exchange for water diversion that would supply farms and cities downstream from Potter Valley during the winter. Livestock graze on a patch of field not flooded by a swollen Eel River in Ferndale, California, in 2024. Stephen Lam / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images Pauli also argues that it’s possible to mitigate the negative effects of dam removal for local farmers in Potter Valley by expanding a nearby dam on the Russian River and building other water storage projects in the valley. She said that opponents of dam removal haven’t been advocating for those projects, which would make the area more self-reliant. Covello and the other opponents of dam removal don’t believe that those replacement projects for Potter Valley will ever be built, or that the winter water diversions from the Eel River will come to fruition. She also said she’s heard from both tribal members in the area and employees at PG&E that dam removal will offer far fewer benefits than proponents claim. ‘It’s not gonna happen, and it’s not gonna work,’ she said. ‘What we have works right now, and California can’t build anything to save its life.’ A spokesperson for PG&E said the utility had tried multiple times to find a buyer for the dam and is moving forward with decommissioning. The spokesperson said that there has been ‘misinformation’ about the utility’s role and the availability of alternatives to dam removal. ‘There is a significant difference between an entity inquiring about the Potter Valley Project and actually submitting a proposal to acquire the project,’ the spokesperson said in an apparent reference to Elsinore Valley’s overtures. Keeping the dams up would be an enormous challenge, even if Elsinore Valley succeeds in acquiring them. By all accounts, the Potter Valley Project is in terrible condition. The hydroelectric power house broke down in 2021, and the diversion tunnel from the dams sits on a seismic fault zone capable of triggering a major earthquake. Furthermore, the dams are out of compliance with federal environmental laws around fish passage and water quality. Upgrading them to meet all these conditions would take hundreds of millions of dollars. FERC, for its part, appears to be moving forward with the Potter Valley dam license surrender and decommissioning in lieu of any viable alternative. On May 22, the agency kicked off its environmental assessment of the Potter Valley removal project by releasing its first National Environmental Policy Act scoping document. That document calls dam retention ‘infeasible’ because of seismic stability concerns, fruitless past efforts to find an operator for the project, and PG&E’s preferred alternative to remove the structure. ‘FERC is saying, ‘There’s nothing else in front of us to assess,’’ said CalTrout’s Schenider. ‘It’s certainly helpful [in] understanding where things are actually at.’ Even though they’re on opposite sides of California’s traditional conservation debate, which pits environmentalists who want to keep water in rivers against farmers who want to use it, Schneider agrees with Pauli, the local grape and hay farmer who thinks dam removal is the best path forward for the community. ‘For USDA, some funding support for those farmers … strikes me as a much better use of their time and energy than trying to save 100-year-old dams that are eventually going to fill with sediment,’ he said. Kyle Farmer, a farmer and rancher who lives in Potter Valley, said the truth is far more nuanced than the fish-versus-people framing that Rollins has adopted. He once fought to preserve the dam, but now he views the big challenge in Potter Valley as finding a way to make farmers and residents whole once the dams inevitably go down. ‘It would be great if this was a fish-versus-farmer problem, because there is a lot of precedent on how to handle those,’ he said. ‘What we haven’t made much progress on is how to replace aging infrastructure. This is more like a town whose bridge is failing.’ This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why is this Trump official dead set on saving a failing California dam? on Jun 2, 2026.