Eel River water proposal shelved

A recently revived, controversial proposal to divert water from a protected portion of the Eel River near Dos Rios has been quietly shelved after a negative legal opinion.

“For now, we’ve put the whole Dos Rios thing on hold,” said Roland Sanford, director of the Mendocino County Water Agency.

County supervisors had resuscitated the decade-old proposal in September, agreeing to spend up to $50,000 for a study and legal opinion.

They were scheduled to discuss the plan and legal opinion late last month, but the discussion was delayed, apparently indefinitely.

“We’re very pleased,” said David Drell of the Willits Environmental Center, which has been at the forefront of opposition to the proposal.

The legal opinion listed expensive legal obstacles to taking water from the section of Eel River that has both state and federal designations as “wild and scenic.”

At the very least, pursuing the project would require an environmental impact report and undoubtedly would be legally challenged by environmental groups, according to the opinion by Rossmann and Moore LLP, a San Francisco company specializing water and land use issues.

The opinion said the proposal’s likelihood of overcoming the obstacles was “uncertain.”

Under the proposal, water would be taken from the main stem of the Eel River near the Highway 101 Covelo exit in northern Mendocino County during spring high-river flows.

In the plan’s most recent incarnation, the water was to be piped about 45 miles along the railroad right-of-way to Lake Mendocino at an estimated cost of more than $200 million.

The proposal initially called for building a new reservoir to store the water.