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April 19, 2022 \u2014 The license for the Potter Valley Project expired on Thursday, April 14. By Friday, a coalition of environmentalists and fishermen had filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue PG&E, the project owner, under the Endangered Species Act. The main complaint is that the fish passage facility at Cape Horn Dam in Potter Valley causes unauthorized harm to endangered fish, by preventing their passage when the facility is clogged, or making them vulnerable to predators as they try to climb the ladder.\nThe Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has authority over the project because its stated purpose is generating hydropower, has not yet declared if it will order PG&E to surrender and decommission the project, or if it will allow the utility to continue operating it on a year-to-year basis, as the company has said it plans to do while it recoups the cost of an expensive piece of replacement equipment.\nRedgie Collins, the Legal and Policy Director for CalTrout, one of the groups intending to sue PG&E, says that, with the expiration of the license, \u201cPG&E no longer has take coverage for listed species, meaning that they can no longer harm, harass, directly kill or injure salmon (or) steelhead at their project site. The current fish passage operation is functionally broken and leads to take. It\u2019s time for PG&E to realize that this project does in fact take fish.\u201d\nLast month, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) wrote a letter to FERC, saying that the Project is causing take of fish on the endangered species list, in a manner not anticipated in that agency\u2019s 2002 biological opinion. The biological opinion allowed the project to operate if it met certain conditions. Collins added that, \u201cAlong with the license, NMFS\u2019 biological protections also expire with that license, meaning that PG&E is now vulnerable to litigation we are bringing.\u201d\nPG&E said in a statement that, \u201cThe potential claims described in the notice are without merit. PG&E is strongly committed to environmental responsibility, and we are operating the Potter Valley Project in full compliance with the National Marine Fisheries Services\u2019 (NMFS) Biological Opinion (BiOp) and its incidental take statement, which is incorporated into the Potter Valley license. Upon expiration of a license, the Federal Power Act requires FERC to issue an annual license, which renews automatically, with the same terms and conditions for the project, until it\u2019s relicensed, transferred or decommissioned. That means PG&E will continue to own and operate the Potter Valley Project safely under the existing license conditions until the project is transferred or FERC issues a final license surrender and decommissioning order.\u201d \nThe project is currently unable to produce power because of a damaged transformer, which could take two years to rebuild.\nAlicia Hamann, the Executive Director of Friends of the Eel River, which has been at the forefront of the fight to remove the dams, describes the Eel as \u201ca river of opportunity,\u201d with 280 miles of habitat for genetically diverse fish that haven\u2019t made it to the ocean since 1922, when Scott Dam was built. She\u2019s not entirely opposed to a continued diversion of water from the Eel into the Russian River. \u201cThe genetics for summer steelhead live on in rainbow trout that are trapped behind Scott Dam,\u201d she said. \u201cThis means that there\u2019s potential for the offspring of those trout to essentially become summer steelhead once again, if they could just reach the ocean\u2026there\u2019s still an opportunity for an ecologically appropriate diversion. By that, I mean one that operates without a dam and runs during the wet season, when the Eel has water supplies to spare. At this point, it\u2019s up to Russian River water users to decide how much they want to continue the diversion, and to come together to fund and implement a plan.\u201d\nThat might be easier said than done. On the day the license expired, Janet Pauli, of the Potter Valley Irrigation District, reported on the results of early surveys to the Inland Water and Power Commission. The IWPC had hired a consultant who polled Russian River water users. \u201cIt ended up being a polling base of about 23,000 people,\u201d Paulie said. \u201cI think they did nearly 400 polls of individuals. \u201cThe goal was to see if people had an understanding of their water supply, where it comes from, potential vulnerability with regard to the Potter Valley Project, how they felt water supply was being managed, or if they even knew. At the end of that poll, it was determined that to get a two-thirds vote for a parcel tax would be tough. Might not be successful. And would not, in all likelihood, generate the kind of funding that we believe we\u2019re going to need moving forward in this next phase of the project license.\u201d\nIt\u2019s impossible to be unaware of water conditions in the Eel River basin, according to Adam Canter, the Director of Natural Resources for the Wiyot Tribe at the Table Mountain Bluff Reservation in Humboldt Ba...