For 16 years, Grant Davis has run the agency that delivers Russian River drinking water to more than 600,000 people in Sonoma and Marin counties. On Aug. 25 he walks away, and Sonoma Water has not yet said who picks up the job.
Davis announced his retirement June 29 in a letter to the agency’s board of directors — the county supervisors, who double as Sonoma Water’s governing board. He joined the agency in 2007 and has held the general manager’s chair since 2010, apart from one five-month detour to Sacramento.
“Serving as Sonoma Water’s general manager has been the honor of my career,” Davis said in a statement. “Sonoma Water is an extraordinary organization because of its people, and I am deeply grateful to the Board of Directors for their trust and support throughout my tenure.”
Sonoma Water is the wholesaler behind most of the region’s taps. It pulls naturally filtered river water from wells along the Russian near Forestville and sells it to cities and districts from Windsor and Santa Rosa down through Petaluma and into Marin. The agency also maintains nearly 100 miles of streams and detention basins for flood protection and runs eight sanitation zones and districts, including the one serving Guerneville and the lower river.
The signature move of Davis’ tenure sits behind Coyote Valley Dam. Sonoma Water worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to update the Lake Mendocino water control manual so the reservoir can hold on to winter water when the forecast shows no storm coming, instead of dumping it downstream on a fixed schedule. That approach — forecast-informed reservoir operations — turned Lake Mendocino into a national test case, and reservoirs across the West are now borrowing from it.
The list runs on from there: rebuilt salmon and steelhead habitat along Dry Creek, a water transmission system that runs on carbon-free power, a new Bay Area weather radar network built to see atmospheric rivers coming, and $47.8 million in state grant money for sewer work in the Russian River County Sanitation District.
Then there is Potter Valley. Davis helped pull regional, state, federal and tribal partners into the two-basin plan meant to keep some Eel River water flowing into the upper Russian after PG&E gives up its century-old diversion. That handoff is years from finished, and whoever replaces Davis inherits it — along with the agency’s long-running effort to update its Russian River water rights and the bill for keeping decades-old pipes and pumps in service.
Davis has left once before. Gov. Jerry Brown named him director of the state Department of Water Resources in August 2017, handing him the State Water Project while the department was still answering for the Oroville Dam spillway failure — a crisis that hit months before Davis arrived. The job lasted five months. He had taken a pay cut to go, earning $194,600 at the state against the $240,710 the agency paid him in 2016, the Sonoma Index-Tribune reported at the time. Davis asked the county for his old post back, saying he wanted to serve his home community after the October 2017 fires, and the board reappointed him in January 2018.
“Grant’s leadership strengthened Sonoma Water and established our agency as one with an exemplary reputation in water management and innovation,” Board Chair Rebecca Hermosillo said in the announcement. “He built lasting partnerships, championed environmental stewardship and guided investments that will benefit our communities for generations.”
Before Sonoma Water, Davis ran The Bay Institute, a science-based nonprofit focused on the San Francisco Bay-Delta, and spent his earlier career as a staffer for three members of Congress, a state senator and an Assembly member.
The June 29 announcement named no interim manager and set no timeline for a search. That decision belongs to the supervisors, and the calendar is short: Davis’ last day is less than two months out.
In his letter to the board, Davis kept the goodbye short too. “As a Board, you allowed us to innovate. You supported us in taking bold, informed risks,” he wrote. “It has been a wonderful ride. Thank you.”