Pine Flat Reservoir Expansion in the News
Don Pedro Reservoir November 22, 2025
In the last River Advocate I gave my brief rundown on how the Congressional reapportionment might affect some notable threatened rivers with noteworthy recreational uses. One of those has remained in the news: the Kings River.
Congressman Vince Fong (R-Bakersfield)
Unfortunately, that press and social media has been generated by Congressman Vince Fong (R-Bakersfield), one of the dam raise’s boosters, who’s expected to have a safe Congressional District. Here’s just some samples of his Kings River dam-raise boosting work: Fong Press Release | FOX 26 Fresno | Hanford Sentinel | Facebook post | Twitter post | Fox 26 (again) | Instagram post
This type of one-sided dam-booster coverage is not unprecedented. Southern San Joaquin Valley politicians all rallied around the proposed giant Temperance Flat dam on the San Joaquin River gorge—until financing realities (even with subsidies) temporarily put the dam on the shelf until the south Valley could harvest sufficient state and federal subsidies to reconstruct the federal Friant-Kern Canal, sinking as the ground sinks from excessive groundwater pumping for Valley agriculture.
A number of southern San Joaquin Valley politicians and institutions, faced with the reality of decades of unsustainable groundwater over pumping, are also rallying around a plan to pump two to nine million-acre-feet from the Delta and Sacramento River in spite of clear warnings of fishery and water quality problems from the four million acre-feet of pumping there in a typical year today.
Dry Kern River. Photo Credit Bring Back the Kern
The proposed 120,700 acre-feet of new storage at Pine Flat Reservoir on the fully appropriated Kings River won’t do much to erase the south Valley’s typical two to three million acre-feet of groundwater over pumping any more than the proposed net 1,261,000 acre-feet Temperance Flat dam on the fully appropriated San Joaquin River and its pittance of water. The law of diminishing marginal returns from economics applies to dams as well. There isn’t much more water left to squeeze out.
Saying it another way, you just can’t dam your way to Paradise on the nearby Valley rivers anymore.
Sadly, until the “powers that be” in the south Valley recognize that, the war drumbeat to build larger bathtub rings around the Central Valley rivers will continue.
It won’t be easy, and it may be up to us to tame those drums into a gentle orchestral adagio from which the Valley can learn to live more harmoniously with the river wealth nature has bestowed upon the people there.
