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


"For now, we've put the whole Dos Rios thing on hold," Mendocino County Water Agency chief Roland Sanford said.

Mendocino County supervisors had resuscitated the decade-old proposal aimed at increasing the county's water supply, agreeing in September to spend up to $50,000 for a study and legal opinion.

The board was scheduled to discuss the plan and legal opinion last month, but Sanford said that has been delayed 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 obstacles to taking water from a section of the Eel River that has state and federal designations as wild and scenic.

At the least, the project would require an environmental impact report, and it undoubtedly would face legal challenges from environmental groups, according to the opinion by Rossmann and Moore, a San Francisco firm specializing in water and land use.

The opinion echoed issues raised by environmentalists and other critics since the proposal was first raised by Mendocino County Supervisor John Pinches in the 1990s.

"This outside legal opinion agreed with us almost completely," Drell said.

At issue was a plan to take water during spring high-flow runs from the main stem of the Eel River near the Covelo exit on Highway 101 in northern Mendocino County.

In the 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 legal opinion notes that the county would need to keep track of the water to ensure that it was needed, was used within the county and was not used for purposes, including agriculture, that are prohibited under wild and scenic regulations.

An early incarnation of the plan called for a new reservoir to store the water.

The diversion plan has met with resistance and legal threats since its initial unveiling. Critics said it would be too expensive, face too many legal hurdles and wasn't needed.

The county has plenty of water in the winter, they said. What it needs is more places to store that water.

Most county agencies initially ignored Pinches' proposal.

Only the Redwood Valley County Water District pursued the plan, seeking rights to the water in 1997.

Redwood Valley has been under a moratorium on new water hookups for almost 20 years because it has only a limited, winter water right. It buys the bulk of its water from Sonoma County, which controls supplies in Lake Mendocino.

The water agency spent almost $90,000 applying for water rights and initial engineering studies for the Dos Rios project. But the project was too big and expensive for Redwood Valley alone, which was unable to persuade other county agencies to join its efforts.

Redwood Valley eventually abandoned the effort in favor of other projects, and the state dropped its water right application.

When Pinches returned to the Board of Supervisors last year, he renewed his push for the project. At the very least, he said, the county should apply for a water right to keep someone else from making a claim.

Pinches said this week that the project is too costly for the county to pursue alone. Instead, it will focus on other water projects, some of which have yet to be revealed.

"We've got a smaller project on the horizon," Pinches said.

You can reach Staff Writer Glenda Anderson at 462-6473 or glenda.anderson@press

democrat.com.