San Francisco Mayor London Breed has nominated City Attorney Dennis Herrera to be the next General Manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. If confirmed by the Commission, Herrera will replace Michael Carlin who has been Acting General Manager since Harlan Kelly’s resignation last fall.
We respect and honor Herrera, as we do all members and staff of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Providing reliable water to San Francisco and other Bay Area communities is an essential task.
Our issue with San Francisco, as Senator Lois Wolk explains, is not over its use of Tuolumne River water but rather how it is stored. No other city has destroyed a national treasure to find a place to store its water.
At Restore Hetch Hetchy, we will always acknowledge the importance of providing reliable water supplies as we contest San Francisco’s continued use of Hetch Hetchy as a storage tank. In our view, San Francisco officials should reciprocate by recognizing the merits of our campaign. Unfortunately, most of the City’s public statements in opposition to Restore Hetch Hetchy, such as the one Herrera made in 2018, fail to acknowledge that the reservoir lies inside Yosemite National Park.
We can do better. We can restore Hetch Hetchy without losing a drop of water. We suspect City leaders in San Francisco will be among the last to endorse restoration. Until they do, we ask that they pay us a modicum of respect by acknowledging our worthy objective of restoring a spectacular landscape in a national park.
We ask that all readers, including both supporters and skeptics of restoration, review Keeping Promisescarefully and consider its merits. Let us know if you’d like a hard copy (510-893-3400 or admin@hetchhetchy.org).
As Keeping Promises shows, when Congress passed the Raker Act allowing San Francisco to build a dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley, it expected the area would still be fully available to park visitors. Unfortunately, for the past century public access to Hetch Hetchy has been limited and few recreational opportunities have been made available.
Camping, lodging, boating and fishing are not available at Hetch Hetchy. There are few trails (and the most popular trail must be closed for safety when Hetch Hetchy’s waterfalls are at their most spectacular). The entrance gate is open only during limited daylight hours, so it’s the rare visitor who sees a sunrise or sunset at Hetch Hetchy. As a result, Hetch Hetchy is the least-visited and most under-appreciated area of Yosemite, receiving barely 1% of the park’s visitors.
We want people to visit Hetch Hetchy and learn its story. While the valley floor lies underwater, the surrounding area is still one of earth’s most spectacular landscapes. We believe improved access will both provide public benefits to today’s park visitors AND build support to empty the reservoir and return Hetch Hetchy Valley to its natural splendor.
It’s time for a change. Keeping Promises documents an incontrovertible history that has been ignored for far too long. Restore Hetch Hetchy has asked the National Park Service to initiate a public dialogue to review and modify how it manages the Hetch Hetchy area. There are ways to improve the visitor experience, consistent with both the letter and spirit of the Raker Act, that would retain the wild character of the Hetch Hetchy canyon and, of course, the water quality in Hetch Hetchy Reservoir.
Yosemite National Park has announced that most visitors will require reservations to enter the park between May 21 and September 30 this year. Due to the pandemic, masks and socially distancing etc. will be required.
Just like the people who operate grocery stores, work in health care and provide so many other public services, staff in Yosemite will be working harder than ever under challenging conditions to ensure public safety.
So, if you go, be patient and courteous. Thank, but do not hug, a ranger.
It might also just be a good time to visit Hetch Hetchy. As Carmen George noted in her Fresno Bee article, reservations are not needed to enter Yosemite through the Hetch Hetchy entrance.
That’s good, or not so good, depending on how you look at it.
It’s good, because you can indeed go without a permit. Even with the reservoir covering the valley floor, Hetch Hetchy is a spectacular landscape.
The reason, however, that Hetch Hetchy is so uncrowded is that the National Park Service has never provided the opportunities for visitors that were widely dicussed when the Raker Act was passed and Congress expected would be available at Hetch Hetchy.
Camping, lodging, boating and fishing are not available. There are few trails and Hetch Hetchy’s most popular trail must often be closed for safety when waterfalls are at their most spectacular. The entrance gate is open only during limited daylight hours, so it’s the rare visitor who sees a sunrise or sunset. It’s no wonder Hetch Hetchy is the least-visited and most under-appreciated area of Yosemite and receives barely 1% of the park’s visitors.
Hetch Hetchy can accommodate more visitors in 2021 and in future years while protecting the area’s wilderness quality and wildlife, and without harming water quality in the reservoir. Restore Hetch Hetchy will be asking the National Park Service to provide improved public access. We believe people need to see the wonderful landscape and learn the story of the valley’s damming, so they will then support the opportunity to return Hetch Hetchy to its natural splendor.
An editorial opinion in last week’s Los Angeles Times has endorsed Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson’s proposal to restore salmon in his state by breeching 4 dams on the lower Snake River. Historically, sockeye salmon would make a 900 mile journey to spawn in places like Redfish Lake (shown at left) – swimming first up the Columbia River, then the Snake River and finally up Idaho’s eponymous Salmon River.
Removing the Snake River dams is a principal focus of Patagonia’s “Damnation” (released in 2015). Opponents point to the hydropower production that would be lost (about 8000 gWh per year) as well as dams’ role in making a waterway for barge traffic to transport agricultural products from farms in eastern Washington.
The successful emergence of solar and wind technology is helping to make the loss of hydropower more palatable. The removal of four dams on the Klamath River along the California-Oregon border is expected to result in a loss of about 900 gWh per year, a small fraction of the Snake River value. The Klamath dam removal project seems to be on track and will perhaps be completed by 2024.
Restoring Hetch Hetchy is likely to result in a loss of about 350 gWh per year, as San Francisco’s Kirkwood powerplant would be inoperable in summer and fall. That’s less than half of the Klamath value and a small fraction of the Snake River value.
Restore Hetch Hetchy remains committed to a plan that replaces every kilowatt of power and every drop of water that the O’Shaughnessy Dam and Hetch Hetchy Reservoir currently make possible. The Snake and Klamath examples underscore that power replacement is eminently doable. For us the water side is trickier, largely due to California’s cattywampus water rights system – but we are confident it can be solved as well.
Kudos to Congressman Simpson for his courage to step forward with a provocative proposal. Who’s going to step forward for Hetch Hetchy?
AdventureBound Interview: It was great to talk with Host Rob Roy about Hetch Hetchy. He has a very nice way of getting to the core of why places like Hetch Hetchy matter so much to all of us. Rob is a navy pilot and a relatively new father – which has inspired him to do in-depth interviews with professional athletes, thrill seekers, entrepreneurs and everyday people who continually make conscious decisions to spend more time outdoors.
Check out ourinterview on AdventureBound. You’ll enjoy it. And check out Rob’s other interviews as well.
Hetch Hetchy Hubris: Dennis Herrera, City Attorney of San Francisco, took on the State of Texas in the wake of the recent storm that left millions without power and water. In the course of writing “So you want to leave California for Texas? Think again” for the San Francisco Chronicle, Herrera does a little bragging about Hetch Hetchy.
It’s hard to blame Herrera for defending his city. That’s what politicians do, especially when the media has been filled with stories about businesses leaving California for friendlier and less costly environments. Moreover, public officials should take pride in the reliable delivery of water and power to their customers.
Herrera’s statement about San Francisco’s electricity, however, is rife with inaccuracies. Does he even know, for example, that only one of the City’s three hydroelectric powerplants is connected to the reservoir?
And bragging about San Francisco’s “ingenious gravity-fed system from Hetch Hetchy high in the Sierra” simply sticks in the craw of folks who love Yosemite and want to see Hetch Hetchy restored. Herrera leaves out the fact that the reservoir is the result of “America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism” (the title of historian Robert Righter’s book) and that everyone concedes no one would let such a dam be built today.
Someday, San Francisco politicians will be able to say they gave Hetch Hetchy back to Yosemite and the American people, while continuing to deliver reliable water and power. That will be something to brag about!
I hope you are well and are able to celebrate the holidays, even though most of our traditional gatherings have been restricted or eliminated due to the Covid-19 pandemic. There are better times ahead.
We are all looking forward to 2021. There’s still time, however, to make a tax-deductible donation in 2020 so that we can continue our campaign to undo the greatest damage ever suffered in America’s national parks.
Making Yosemite whole again will inspire a new generation of conservationists. We must convince San Francisco, using either a carrot or a stick (or a bit of both), to make water system improvements as many California water agencies have been doing for more than 25 years.
We are looking forward to working with the new Congress, the new Administration in Washington DC and officials in San Francisco. We will be pressing forward on all fronts, including:
promoting water system alternatives that employ technological innovation and California’s new groundwater law,
showing how the National Park Service has allowed San Francisco to deny public access in the Hetch Hetchy Canyon,
demanding a change to the insignificant $30,000 in annual rent that San Francisco pays for the right to store water in Yosemite National Park, and
expounding the tremendous unparalleled opportunity to return Hetch Hetchy to its natural splendor.
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