Dianne Feinstein: a complicated legacy for rivers

California’s senior U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein recently passed away after 31 years in the U.S. Senate. To say that she was influential on California water matters would be an understatement. I’ve prepared some personal recollections for Friends of the River.

Senator Feinstein’s introduction to high-stake water and rivers games came when she was still the mayor of San Francisco. In 1987, the year that I joined the FOR staff, President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior Don Hodel floated the idea of restoring Hetch-Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. She soon paid her first visit Yosemite and was calling O’Shaughnessy Dam and Hetch-Hetchy Reservoir “San Francisco’s birthright….”