Twenty-two governments share responsibility for Clear Lake, and they have never all put their names on the same page. On Tuesday, Lake County’s supervisors voted to add theirs.
The board approved the Clear Lake Watershed and Chi Memorandum of Understanding Co-Management Agreement — the first framework joining six federally recognized tribes, a dozen state agencies, the county and the cities of Lakeport and Clearlake in shared stewardship of the watershed and the Clear Lake hitch, the fish the Pomo call chi and the Lake Miwok call Ṣátti. County Administrative Officer Susan Parker will sign for the county at a ceremony planned for Sept. 11, somewhere in Lake County.
Who is at the table
The tribal signatories are the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake, Robinson Rancheria, the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, Middletown Rancheria, the Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians and Elem Indian Colony. On the state side, the agreement pulls in the California Natural Resources Agency, the California Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, State Parks, the State Lands Commission, the California Conservation Corps, the State Water Resources Control Board and its Central Valley regional board, and the departments that handle pesticides, recycling, toxics and health hazard assessment.
The document runs on a premise stated in its opening pages: the chi “is not only a native species — it is a cultural relative and a teacher,” and the problems killing it — altered hydrology, legacy mercury contamination, harmful algal blooms, invasive species and what the draft calls “fragmented governance and historic injustice” — cannot be solved by any single government acting alone.
What it does, and what it doesn’t
The agreement is a framework, not a contract. It is explicitly nonbinding, obligates no money, and any party can walk away on 60 days’ written notice. It runs five years from the final signature and renews automatically.
What it commits the parties to is structure: it puts the existing Clear Lake Hitch Task Force at the center under a written charter, adds an annual work plan, an annual meeting of all parties and a leadership summit every two years. Each government files a public statement of what it brings. Robinson Rancheria’s Danoxa Fish and Wildlife Department commits to fish rescue and salvage, spawning surveys and genetic analysis. Fish and Wildlife takes the lead on the Clear Lake Hitch Recovery Plan it began this year under state law. The Conservation Corps offers crews for creek work and pledges to follow tribal direction on sensitive sites. The collaboration list reaches into enforcement, naming water use, pollution, illegal dumping and illegal cannabis grows.
The legal footing is new, too. The pact leans on a 2024 law by Assemblyman James Ramos that encourages the Natural Resources Agency to enter co-management agreements with federally recognized tribes — arrangements where, in the statute’s words, two or more sovereigns “mutually negotiate, define, and allocate amongst themselves the sharing of management functions.”
The agreement did not come out of nowhere. The state seated a Blue Ribbon Committee for the Rehabilitation of Clear Lake in 2017 under a bill by Assemblywoman Cecilia Aguiar-Curry. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2023 drought order directed state agencies to work with tribes in the Clear Lake watershed. State Parks has already signed its own agreements with Big Valley, at Clear Lake State Park, and with the Koi Nation at Anderson Marsh. The parties hammered out this pact’s seven core objectives — coordination, funding capacity, enforcement, tribal leadership among them — at a Clear Lake Hitch Summit in February.
A fish with a deadline problem
The chi is why the paperwork exists. The foot-long minnow, found nowhere else on Earth, has been state-listed as threatened since 2014. A U.S. Geological Survey netting index caught 280 hitch in 2017 and six in 2022 — a roughly 96% collapse. Lake County declared a local emergency for the fish in 2023, and five of the six tribes now signing formed the Clear Lake Hitch Task Force with Fish and Wildlife in September 2022 to keep the run alive while the federal government made up its mind.
Washington still hasn’t. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found federal protection warranted in January 2025, missed its one-year deadline to finalize the listing, and was sued by the Center for Biological Diversity this April. The federal government appears nowhere in Tuesday’s agreement — this is tribes, the state and local government deciding not to wait.
What the board did
Supervisors took the agreement up twice in the board’s chambers at 255 N. Forbes St. in Lakeport — once as the county board, and again minutes later sitting as the board of the Lake County Watershed Protection District, whose water resources director, Pawan Upadhyay, will sign alongside Parker. Both votes carried without opposition. The amendments were housekeeping: naming fixes, a corrected cross-reference that county counsel caught from the dais, and signature pages for Big Valley that had missed the posted agenda packet.
Terry Logsdon, the county’s chief climate resiliency officer and tribal liaison, presented the pact and fielded most of the board’s questions with the same answer: the point is to get 22 governments to “collaborate rather than compete” — above all for grant money, where state agencies and tribes now routinely chase the same pots for the same kinds of projects.
County counsel added a lawyer’s caveat for the record: a nonbinding agreement is hard to enforce, even its promise to collaborate. But the parties are obligated to meet at least annually in good faith, and the agreement as a whole can be terminated only if every party consents or all but one walks away.
The Yolo County question
District 2 Supervisor Bruno Sabatier voted yes and still called the roster incomplete — “one glaring obvious omission,” he said, meaning the Yolo County Flood Control and Water Conservation District, which holds rights to much of the lake’s stored water and controls the dam on Cache Creek that releases it. “They have skin in the game, and they need to start showing it,” Sabatier said. The board agreed to invite the district in once the current round of signatures is collected, and Sabatier asked for a written explanation if Yolo declines.
District 1 Supervisor Helen Owen pressed a different worry — that the county might be repeating the water-rights giveaway it made a century ago. “I’m just worried about repercussions that are not seen at this moment,” she said. Logsdon answered that the pact grants no authority beyond what each government already holds, and the document agrees: the parties “retain all rights, responsibilities, and authorities provided for by law,” reads the existing-rights clause on Page 7, which another supervisor read aloud from the dais. “Our lake is kind of the canary in the coal mine of climate change,” that supervisor said, arguing the county can’t keep working on it alone.
Sarah Ryan, environmental director for the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, where she has worked for 25 years, called the pact “a huge step forward in collaboration and communication” — and pointed to a power the county doesn’t have. “Tribes, for example, can set water quality standards for Clear Lake. The county cannot do that. Only the state and tribes can do that,” she said.
Public comment split the way the board’s questions did. One caller, citing collaborative grant work in Sonoma County, called the agreement “a force multiplier.” Another said it “seems unnecessary, but a potential overreach” — and asked, like Sabatier, where Yolo County was.
Signature lines are waiting for the chairs of all six tribal councils and the heads of every state agency, up to Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot. The chi head up the creeks again in the spring either way.