“In the west, whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting,” the saying goes. And in California, the wealthy coastal elites that dominate the Democratic Party have been using water to beat up rural farming communities for decades.
The latest casualty in the Democratic Party’s war on farmers is the residents, most of them farmers and ranchers, of Potter Valley, a community 18 miles northeast of Ukiah, and 80 miles north of Santa Rosa. The hundreds of family farms that define a way of life in this corner of Mendocino County are about to lose their water supply, which means they are about to die.
At the direction of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) California Public Utilities Commission, the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, has filed plans with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to decommission the Potter Valley Hydroelectric Project. The project actually consists of two dams, the Cape Horn Dam, which was completed in 1908, and the Scott Dam, which was completed in 1920. For over 100 years, the water from the Potter Valley Project, which created Lake Pillsbury, was the primary water source for almost 400 farms and a secondary water source for residential communities stretching from Ukiah to Santa Rosa…