{"id":929444,"date":"2026-07-12T07:43:51","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T07:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/929444\/"},"modified":"2026-07-12T07:43:51","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T07:43:51","slug":"ukiah-has-plenty-of-water-the-ukiah-valley-doesnt-the-mendocino-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/929444\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukiah has plenty of water \u2014 the Ukiah Valley doesn’t \u2022 The Mendocino Voice"},"content":{"rendered":"

MENDOCINO CO., 7\/11\/26 \u2014 Drill a well in Redwood Valley, and a gallon a minute can pass for good news. Twenty gallons a minute, by local standards, is a gusher. Drill one a few miles south, inside the city of Ukiah, and some wells pump more than 1,000.<\/p>\n

Same valley, same rain. The difference is what\u2019s under the ground.<\/p>\n

Sean White has run the Ukiah Valley\u2019s water from both ends of the pipe. He managed the Russian River Flood Control district, the agency that sells the valley its river water. Then he ran the City of Ukiah\u2019s water utility until he retired in December. The city keeps him on as a \u201cretired annuitant\u201d \u2014 pension-system speak for a retiree hired back part-time \u2014 and he works a few hours a week.<\/p>\n

So when the district he used to manage announced it had, for the first time, no more river water to sell, the obvious question landed on him. Ukiah says it has plenty of water. Is that true?<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not freaking out,\u201d White said in a phone interview last week. \u201cFor the city itself, we\u2019re, I think, in pretty good shape.\u201d<\/p>\n

The catch is in the words \u201cthe city itself.\u201d The city of Ukiah and the Ukiah Valley are not the same thing. The city is the town in the middle of the valley. The valley around it \u2014 the vineyards, the pear orchards, seven small water systems, rural homes up and down the valley floor \u2014 lives on two kinds of water: river water sold under contract, and the groundwater below. The river water is spoken for, with a waiting list. The groundwater is huge \u2014 if your well can reach it. The city\u2019s wells do. Much of the rest of the valley\u2019s don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

For anyone in the valley outside city limits, that means there is no new river water to be had, at any price. A new home on rural land, a new vineyard block, a hookup to one of the seven small water systems \u2014 anything that needs water the valley hasn\u2019t already promised to someone now goes on a waiting list. And the river behind every one of those promises is about to get smaller.<\/p>\n

The lucky spot<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ask why people settled where they did in the first place, White said \u2014 in the footprint of what is now the city, back when nobody had power tools to drill deep. \u201cGroundwater was abundant and shallow here,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it kind of remains that way today.\u201d<\/p>\n

The city holds surface rights \u201csenior to everybody,\u201d he said \u2014 a claim dating to the 1870s, before California required water permits \u2014 plus later rights senior to most users. Its wells sit on what he calls the sweet spot of the basin. All but one well are 260 feet deep, sealed down past the two layers that cap the deep aquifer. The one shallow well is permitted and treated as surface water.<\/p>\n

The scale is the argument. The basin\u2019s groundwater plan puts storage in the valley\u2019s two main aquifers at somewhere around 400,000 acre-feet. Lake Mendocino, White noted for scale, holds about 125,000. Pumping across the whole valley draws about 8,000 acre-feet a year, he said, and the city takes 2,000 to 2,500 of that.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we\u2019re in a good spot,\u201d he said. \u201cOur forefathers figured that out way before computer models.\u201d<\/p>\n

What refills the aquifer, he said, is mostly not the river. It\u2019s winter runoff from the western hills. Through the droughts of the early 2020s, \u201cyou\u2019ll see our surface water get drawn down a small amount, especially compared to what you see in the Central Valley,\u201d he said \u2014 but the wells come back as soon as the rain does, even when a drought runs for years.<\/p>\n

\"ALake Mendocino stretches south from its Highway 20 shoreline near Ukiah, Calif., on May 23, 2026. The reservoir is where the Russian River Flood Control and Water Conservation Improvement District draws its 7,940 acre-foot allocation, which was fully subscribed for the first time in 2025 and now falls short of requests. (Roger Coryell\/Bay City News)<\/p>\n

Redwood Valley lost that lottery, and White is blunt about it. The community \u201chas essentially no aquifer,\u201d he said. A well there might \u201cmake a gallon a minute, or maybe 20 gallons a minute, which is like a total gusher in Redwood Valley,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd some of our city wells are over 1,000 a minute. That\u2019s how big the disparity is.\u201d<\/p>\n

People who can\u2019t drill their way to water buy it. Which brings in the district that just ran out.<\/p>\n

Start with the seller\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Russian River Flood Control & Water Conservation Improvement District \u2014 \u201cflood control,\u201d in valley shorthand \u2014 holds a state license to sell up to 7,940 acre-feet a year out of Lake Mendocino. An acre-foot covers one acre of land a foot deep, about 326,000 gallons. That water supplies seven small water systems and dozens of vineyards, orchards and rural homes across the Ukiah Valley.<\/p>\n

Flood control is sold out. It said so plainly in a June 1 report: in May 2025, for the first time, every acre-foot of the 7,940 was under contract. New requests went on hold. When a little water opened up in February, the waiting list already wanted more than there was.<\/p>\n

Flood control\u2019s board has started writing rules for scarcity. A policy adopted June 1 says no applicant gets priority when requests outrun supply. The wholesale rate rose from $66 to $72 per acre-foot \u2014 about 9% \u2014 and the board held the increase that low only by pulling $35,020 from its water-supply reliability reserve.<\/p>\n

Redwood Valley County Water District is the wholesale water customer with the least to fall back on. It sits on no usable aquifer and holds no water right of its own; flood control\u2019s supply is essentially its lifeline.<\/p>\n

Now flood control and Redwood Valley\u2019s water district are set to merge boundaries. Mendocino County supervisors voted Tuesday to approve flood control\u2019s plan to annex 9,610 acres of Redwood Valley water district territory, sending the plan toward a hearing before the county\u2019s boundary commission, expected in September. That\u2019s separate from \u2014 and shouldn\u2019t be confused with \u2014 the city of Ukiah\u2019s own annexation fight, which is a different proposal entirely. This one would put Redwood Valley\u2019s territory inside flood control\u2019s borders instead of outside them looking in as a customer.<\/p>\n

What annexation cannot do is create water. The 7,940 acre-feet were fully spoken for before the paperwork started. Flood control\u2019s boundary will grow; the supply behind it will not.<\/p>\n

The assumption underneath everything<\/strong><\/p>\n

The water is running short now because a big share of it was never Russian River water at all. For a century, the Potter Valley Project \u2014 a hydropower complex owned by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. \u2014 has sent Eel River water through a mountain tunnel into the East Fork Russian River, where it fills Lake Mendocino. The flood control district says so itself: diversions from the Eel provide \u201ca substantial portion\u201d of the water it sells. PG&E is retiring the project and tearing out both of its dams. Federal regulators accepted its plan Oct. 31, 2025. Less Eel water through the tunnel means less water in Lake Mendocino \u2014 the same lake every one of those sold-out contracts draws from.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the soft spot: every official document that calls the valley\u2019s water \u201csustainable\u201d assumes that flow keeps coming.<\/p>\n

The valley\u2019s groundwater agency wrote the plan behind every \u201csustainable\u201d in this story. That agency \u2014 the Ukiah Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency \u2014 is a joint powers authority formed in 2017 by the County of Mendocino, the City of Ukiah, the flood control district and the Upper Russian River Water Agency, whose seat has since passed to the new Ukiah Valley Water Authority. The state approved the plan in 2023, with homework attached.<\/p>\n

The plan finds the basin \u201cwill be sustainable over the next twenty years if planned projects and management actions are implemented as needed.\u201d That verdict rests on a water budget that holds surface-water diversions \u201cconstant and equal to that of the water year 2018\u201d \u2014 a year when the Potter Valley Project ran at full tilt \u2014 and never models the diversion going away.<\/p>\n

The agency conceded as much in its responses to public comments: that analysis \u201ccould not fit within the scope\u201d of the plan. The state Department of Water Resources ordered the fix: count the Eel River imports and show how reliable they really are, with answers due in the plan\u2019s first periodic update in 2027.<\/p>\n

Asked whether the city has modeled its groundwater with less Eel water, or none, White pointed to the modeling behind the plan. Consultant Larry Walker Associates ran the aquifer through a range of scenarios, he said, including what he recalled as a critically dry September with \u201cessentially no water \u2014 no releases from Lake Mendocino.\u201d Even then, he said, the upper Russian\u2019s main stem kept a trickle of groundwater-fed flow \u201cand the groundwater was okay.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was careful not to sound too comfortable. \u201cI don\u2019t want anyone to think that we think we\u2019re in some opulent position and don\u2019t have to think about it or whatever,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause that just will induce irresponsible behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"A rendering of the New Eel Russian Facility which will replace the existing Potter Valley Project water diversion facilities in Mendocino County, Calif. (Sonoma Water via Bay City News)<\/p>\n

The diversion to come<\/strong><\/p>\n

What replaces the old project is a diversion without the dams. A new joint agency, the Eel-Russian Project Authority \u2014 Sonoma County, Sonoma Water and Mendocino County\u2019s Inland Water and Power Commission \u2014 wants to build the New Eel-Russian Facility at the Cape Horn Dam site, with roughly $9 million in state grant money for design and permits. The Round Valley Indian Tribes hold a seat on its board. The Tribes\u2019 Eel River water rights are senior to everyone else\u2019s, which means any new diversion runs on their terms.<\/p>\n

Nobody can yet say how much water the new intake will move, or when. The licensed 7,940 acre-feet stays on paper either way. How much wet water stands behind the paper depends on what actually comes through the mountain \u2014 and everyone now waiting in the district\u2019s line is, one way or another, waiting on that answer too.<\/p>\n

Ukiah, meanwhile, is planning like a city that expects to be fine. On June 17, the Ukiah City Council voted without dissent to adopt the city\u2019s 2025 Urban Water Management Plan \u2014 the supply-and-demand forecast the state requires of city water systems every five years. It projects supply \u201csufficient to meet demands through 2050.\u201d The city delivered 3,030 acre-feet of drinking water to more than 5,000 connections in 2025; about 72% of its supply in recent years has come from wells. Nobody from the public spoke. The same night, the council cleared environmental review for a new city well of 600 to 1,000 gallons per minute \u2014 adding pumping power even as it declared plenty.<\/p>\n

White, who prepared the plan and fielded council questions at the hearing, told the council the city is \u201ceffectively at net zero use right now\u201d \u2014 recycling and recharging more water into the aquifer at its wastewater plant than customers take out.<\/p>\n

Good water, borrowed river<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every drop of river water is under contract, and the river itself is about to get smaller. The aquifer is huge, but the settlers of the 1870s claimed the best of it, and the city inherited their spot \u2014 deep wells and senior rights, and a supply that, if White has it right, refills off the hills whether or not the Eel keeps coming through the mountain.<\/p>\n

The decisions that matter most for the valley\u2019s water were made before anyone now living was born: where to settle, where to drill, when to file a claim. The valley isn\u2019t out of water. It\u2019s out of water nobody else has a claim on \u2014 unless, like the city, you staked yours 150 years ago.<\/p>\n

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