In a dry year, Cloverdale will be short of water by a third.
That is the city’s own estimate. It is published in a new draft plan posted to the city’s website on Wednesday. And it is the first time a Russian River town has put a number on what life will look like after Potter Valley — the 100-year-old project that pumps Eel River water into the Russian River — shuts down for good.
PG&E owns the Potter Valley Project. Last July, the company asked federal regulators for permission to take it apart. That paperwork was the official end of an argument that has run for 20 years. The dams are coming out. The diversion is going away. And every town that drinks from the Russian River now has to plan for less of it.
The public has until June 10 to read the plan and send the city written comments. A public hearing will come later this summer.
What the plan says
Every five years, California cities that sell water have to file a long report with the state. It is called an Urban Water Management Plan. Most years it is a routine box-checking exercise that nobody reads.
This one is different. Cloverdale’s 2025 plan is the first one drafted since Potter Valley’s shutdown became real. It treats the loss as a fact, not a worry.
Three numbers stand out:
- In a single dry year, the city will be short by up to 34 percent. That is enough to force watering restrictions across town.
- In a five-year drought, the city will be short by 13 to 24 percent every year.
- If the next five years come in as dry as 2014 through 2016, the shortfall could reach 31 percent.
The plan uses the 2022 drought as its model for a “dry year.” That was the year the state ordered Cloverdale residents to use no more than 104 gallons of water per person per day.
The city’s own executive summary puts it this way: “Reduced water availability from the Russian River is anticipated, especially during high water demand periods in the summer.”
Why this is new
Cloverdale draws all of its drinking water from wells along the Russian River. Because those wells sit right in the soft gravel of the riverbed, the state treats their water as river water, not pure groundwater. The city has held senior rights to that river water since before 1914 — back when California first started keeping track.
For more than a hundred years, that senior status worked as a shield. The state could order other water users to cut back, but Cloverdale was safe.
The 2021 and 2022 droughts broke that shield. For the first time anyone alive can remember, the state ordered cuts that reached even the most senior water users — Cloverdale included. The new plan assumes that kind of order will come again. Senior rights, the plan’s numbers suggest even where its words do not, no longer guarantee water when the river runs dry.
What Potter Valley actually does
The Potter Valley Project sits on the upper Eel River, in Mendocino County. For most of the past century, it has piped about 20 billion gallons a year out of the Eel and into the East Fork of the Russian River. From there, that water flows into Lake Mendocino, gets released slowly through the summer, and helps keep the Russian flowing all the way past Healdsburg, Cloverdale, and beyond.
When PG&E pulls the plug, that water stays in the Eel.
A coalition of agencies — Sonoma Water, Mendocino County’s Inland Water and Power Commission, the Round Valley Tribes, and others — has been trying to build a smaller replacement. It would still pump some Eel water across the divide, but only in winter and only when the river is running high. It would deliver about 10.6 billion gallons a year. That is roughly half of what the old project moves.
The replacement is still in early planning. It has not been approved. It has not been built. The Cloverdale plan assumes only that the old project goes away. It does not model what happens if the smaller replacement also fails to win permits.
What the city plans to do about it
So far, not much.
In every shortage scenario in the new plan, the line labeled “supply augmentation” is blank. The entire fix, on paper, is asking people to use less water. The plan’s shortage rules climb to “Stage 4” in the worst dry years, which means tight watering restrictions, irrigation bans, and the kind of conservation orders Cloverdale saw in 2022.
The plan does say the city is “considering options” — recycled water, new wells, deals with Sonoma Water to manage Lake Mendocino releases. None of those options is described in any detail in the public draft.
How to comment
The full draft is on the city’s website at cloverdale.net, under Document Center, file number 6735. Send written comments before June 10. The city council will hold a public hearing before formally adopting the plan later this summer.
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Wine Country Daily covers Sonoma, Lake, Mendocino, and Napa counties.