City Council meeting April 23, 2024 Consent Item 10.B Potter Valley Diversions Dear Mayor Sparks, Vice Mayor Ford and Councilmembers Lemus, Rivers and Harvey, For item 10.B, it seems strange that it isn’t designating someone to sign for the city. Is this the Mayor or City Manager or attorney or someone else.? I wonder who determined the cost share method, it seems weighted against a smaller city like Cotati.
For the Common Interest Agreement -1st WHEREAS to generate hydroelectric power – should this identify that PGE has not generated any power since July 2021? https://humboldtgov.org/3460/Eel-River-and-the-Potter-Valley-Project https://huffman.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/huffman-statement-on-pgande-plan-toremove-eel-river-dams-ensure-water-supply When you consider item 10.B – possibly part of due diligence in local “politics of water”, I would ask you consider the process going in parallel, the “Eel River Restoration and Conservation Plan Phase 1:
Planning”
While the urban land use in the Russian River has significant impacts on the ecology integrity of the Russian River, the land use on the Eel River is very different with its mountainous areas dispersed across the third largest watershed in California. The Eel River has a better chance of being wild, and abundant source of salmon, as well as potential proposed Eel Russian “run of the river diversion”, and many other multi-use benefit that could greatly contribute to the California 30x30 Initiative To obtain “Eel River Restoration and Conservation Plan”, still in a comment phase, click on https://caltrout.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Eel-River-Plan-ReviewDraft_040224.pdf See the section Preface (on PdfPg10 labelled page “viii” ) And here is what I think is a summary (PdfPg14 “xii”)
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The bounty of the Eel River could not, however, withstand the onslaught of European-American settlers who migrated into the watershed beginning in 1850. And so, as with so many other rivers and salmon populations throughout California, in little more than 40 years humans had pushed these iconic species to the brink of extirpation. By 1893 the Eel River’s abundance was nearly completely wiped out. A prescient letter published in the Ferndale Enterprise stated:
There is no mystery in the cause of the decline of the salmon. The fish have been mercilessly hunted, and the Cutting Packing Co.'s superintendent, Mr. Wetherbee, says there is no stream on the Pacific Coast that is fished as closely as Eel River.
He thinks that the salmon run for the Eel River is a thing of the past. Salmon canning factories multiplied as long as there was a good profit in the business, but when the scarcity was first felt, instead of leading the fishermen to take measures to protect the fish, these factories only encouraged more strenuous efforts to take all that could be caught, and now there are none to catch.
Public Comment
The laws we have to protect the salmon are entirely inadequate when enforced, and are by no means enforced. Whether anything can be done for California streams or not is doubtful.
– Ferndale Enterprise (27 Jan. 1893)
Letter from Lower Island, Cannery Section, Ed. Enterprise More than 130 years later, this great concern persists. Despite these concerns, the Eel River salmon did come back, somewhat, eventually.
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Sincerely Neil Hancock