A Quick Thank-You to Retiring Nancy Pelosi

Fishing is popular from the banks of the Lower McCloud Falls located in Siskiyou County. Credit: Steve Payer, CA Dept. of Water Resources 

Nancy Pelosi had been San Francisco’s Congresswoman for just three months when I joined the Friends of the River staff back in 1987. She will retire in 2026 after serving 20 terms in the House of Representatives. 

Many retrospectives will be made about her consequential career in the coming months and years, but I thought it would be appropriate to offer a thank-you for her dogged and successful effort with Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) to keep Minority Leader and Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) from winning his effort to strip off the McCloud River’s California Wild & Scenic Rivers Act protection by federal statute. 

Nancy Pelosi, 52nd Speaker of the United States House of Representatives

The effort was seldom completely out in the open, and Senator Feinstein’s sympathy for the interests of the powerful Westland Water District (the latter hoping to benefit from drowning more of the McCloud River behind a raised Shasta Dam) no doubt complicated matters.  

Nevertheless, while we sweated back here in California, Pelosi and Huffman worked their magic back in our nation’s capital. While compromises were made in extremis that allowed the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to keep up their design and review efforts to raise Shasta Dam, Reclamation never got construction funding or federal preemption of the California Wild & Scenic Rivers Act. Indeed, when there were Democratic majorities in the House, construction was explicitly blocked. 

Someday, hopefully, the back story about this will be told, but for now, in the words of Kaspar Gutman to San Francisco detective Sam Spade in the film noir classic, The Maltese Falcon, all I can say is, “It was neatly done … indeed, it was.” 

Let’s all keep doing that.