Cloverdale Vice Mayor Todd Lands has spent the better part of this month working the phones with the Trump administration, lobbying USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins and her staff to derail PG&E’s plan to tear down the Potter Valley dams. He told the Press Democrat last week that 750,000 people in the Russian River basin depend on the diverted Eel River water flowing through Cape Horn and Scott. He’s welcomed a Southern California water district’s last-minute interest in buying the project from PG&E. He’s the loudest local elected voice in the room.
More than four months ago, on December 10, Lands voted to adopt a 112-page water analysis that says his own city will be fine without any of it.
Resolution 075-2025 is sitting on the city’s website. Item H.1, Attachment 4 from that December council meeting — the full Water Supply Assessment and Verification for the proposed Esmeralda Project. State law requires it because Esmeralda would add 605 residential units, a 200-room resort hotel, 200 senior-living apartments and the rest of the village to a 266-acre stretch of southeast Cloverdale. Anything over 500 units triggers the WSA process.
The consultant, EKI Environment & Water out of Daly City, didn’t pull punches on the Potter Valley question. They put a whole section on it. Section 7, “Water Supply Reliability and Constraints,” runs from page 46 to page 59 and walks through what happens when the dams come out — the “no alternative” scenario, where Scott Dam, Cape Horn Dam, Lake Pillsbury, the diversion tunnel and the powerhouse all go away, and nothing replaces them.
The numbers are grim for the watershed as a whole. Lake Mendocino inflows drop 44 percent. The reservoir hits empty almost every year, instead of about once every 53 years historically. Summer and fall flows in the Russian River drop, “sometimes to critically low levels.” The Upper Watershed — Forks, Hopland, Cloverdale, Healdsburg — runs “consistently below baseline” in dry season.
And then, page 51, Section 7.2.2:
“Cloverdale, located farther downstream and relying on subsurface underflows of the Russian River under senior pre-1914 water right, is not expected to experience immediate or direct supply reductions, although regional hydrologic conditions could influence long-term system operations and management priorities.”
A footnote on the same page goes further. It cites a 2014 city report and the 2020 Urban Water Management Plan to say that 100 percent of Cloverdale’s water comes from Russian River underflow that does not originate in Lake Mendocino releases. The Eel River water Lands has been defending in Washington flows down through Lake Mendocino, gets stored, gets released to support downstream cities and agriculture. Cloverdale’s wells, sitting in alluvial sediments about 65 feet down, are treated in the WSA as far less directly exposed to Lake Mendocino releases than downstream users. They draw on the river’s own subsurface flow, governed by a water right the city has held since 1884 — senior to all but eleven of the 47 actively used pre-1914 rights in the entire watershed.
The math underneath the legal seniority is unforgiving for anyone arguing Cloverdale needs more water. The city’s pre-1914 right authorizes up to 910 million gallons a year. Total city demand in 2024 was 363 million. Esmeralda at full buildout adds 76 million — and that’s the consultant’s deliberately high estimate, before accounting for low-flow fixtures and the recycled-water system the developer is planning for landscape irrigation. Put another way: 2024 demand plus Esmeralda would be 439 million gallons, just under half the city’s claimed senior entitlement. The WSA’s own 2045 citywide projection, including Esmeralda, is 676 million gallons — not under half, but still below the 910-million-gallon right.
The consultant ran the dry-year scenario too. Multiple consecutive drought years, with the kind of curtailment the State Water Resources Control Board imposed in 2021 — the first-ever mandatory curtailment that briefly hit even Cloverdale’s senior right for 80 days. Even in that case, Esmeralda’s permanent residents would be entitled to about 64 percent of project demand at the bare-minimum 55 gallons per capita per day, and 121 percent of indoor demand at the 104 GPCD level the SWRCB granted Cloverdale on appeal in September 2021. The WSA notes this would actually create a surplus available to other city customers.
The conclusion, in EKI’s measured consultant-speak: Cloverdale is “well-positioned to meet projected demands, including those of the Proposed Project, even under scenarios of reduced inflows, prolonged drought, or temporary curtailment events.”
Lands voted yes. He was mayor at the time. He is vice mayor now.
The 750,000 number isn’t made up, but it is Lands’ number. Sonoma Water’s service area is real, and so are the Russian River cities downstream of Cloverdale that draw their supply from Lake Mendocino releases — Healdsburg, Windsor, Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park, Petaluma, the agricultural users in between. The Eel-Russian Project Authority that’s negotiating with PG&E to keep at least some of the diversion alive after the dams come down through a smaller New Eel-Russian Facility — that coalition includes Sonoma County Water Agency, the Inland Water and Power Commission of Mendocino County, Round Valley Tribes, Humboldt County, Cal Trout, Trout Unlimited, and the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. They got the formal proposal PG&E put in its FERC surrender package. They are working on a real solution.
In the recent fight, Lands has aligned himself with the Elsinore intervention, not the ERPA path PG&E has put in its FERC filing. The Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District proposal Rollins floated on April 21 — the one PG&E says doesn’t actually exist as a written document yet — would scrap the ERPA deal and try to keep the dams in place under a new operator located 600 miles south. PG&E says the regulatory window for a transfer closed years ago, when FERC directed them to file the surrender application now in front of the agency.
Cloverdale’s WSA, in the meantime, is going to load-bear in real council decisions over the next few months. The same Esmeralda Project that the WSA cleared has a planning commission hearing this spring and a city council public hearing this summer, with developer Esmeralda Land Company targeting approvals in 2026. The CEQA addendum that city consultant FirstCarbon is preparing — which the city attorney told the council on April 8 would be reviewed by the council against the legal standard for whether an addendum or supplemental EIR is required — will almost certainly rely on the WSA’s water-supply findings as one foundational input. If the council accepts the addendum, residents demanding a fresh Environmental Impact Report — and there were more than a dozen at the April 8 meeting making that demand — lose their loudest argument.
So the city’s water analysis carries weight in two different rooms. In the Cloverdale council chamber, it’s a foundational water-supply document for the city’s addendum path. In Washington, the same document undercuts the case Lands has been making to USDA. He can have either argument, but it’s awkward to have both at the same time.
Lands is also running for Sonoma County Supervisor. The Potter Valley fight plays well in the upper end of the county; saving farms is a durable Sonoma political position. The WSA was less politically convenient. It says quietly, on page 54, that Cloverdale has a 234-million-gallon-a-year buffer between what its rights allow and what the WSA projects the city will use in 2045, including Esmeralda, and that its city government is well-positioned for whatever comes next.
Including, on the consultant’s own analysis, the dams coming down.
—
Sources: City of Cloverdale Resolution 075-2025 and Items H.1 and E.2 council packets (cloverdale.net/644/Esmeralda-Project-Information). EKI Environment & Water Water Supply Assessment and Verification, November 2025, prepared for the Esmeralda Land Company project. Press Democrat reporting, April 22, 2026. KQED reporting, November 2025. Lost Coast Outpost reporting, April 21–22, 2026. PG&E Final Surrender Application to FERC, July 25, 2025 (FERC Project No. 77).