Editing Hetch Hetchy (section)

===Arguments for===
The battle over Hetch Hetchy Valley continues today{{When|date=October 2019}} between those who wish to retain the dam and reservoir, and those who wish to drain the reservoir and return Hetch Hetchy Valley to its former state. Those in favor of dam removal have pointed out that many actions by San Francisco since 1913 have been in violation of the Raker Act, which explicitly stated that power and water from Hetch Hetchy could not be sold to private interests. Hydroelectric power generated from the Hetch Hetchy project is largely sold to Bay Area customers through a private power company, [[Pacific Gas & Electric]] (PG&E). San Francisco was able to accomplish this in 1925 by claiming it had run out of funds to extend the Hetch Hetchy transmission line all the way to the city. The terminus of the incomplete line was "conveniently located next to a PG&E substation", which connected to PG&E's private line which in turn bridged the gap to San Francisco.<ref>{{cite web
|author=Browne, Brian
|title=Western Water Wars: Efforts to Take Over San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy Systems
|publisher=Reason Foundation
|url=http://reason.org/files/cde416327e84a12ce71cd8f166b86c69.pdf
|access-date=2013-05-26}}</ref> The city justified this as a temporary measure, but no attempt to follow through with completing the municipal grid was ever made.<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://www.clovisnews.com/trails/hetch_hetchy_power.html
|title=Hetch Hetchy Power Debacle: Continuing Yosemite Threat
|author=Redmond, Tim
|publisher=Clovis Free Press
|work=Trails
|volume=17
|number=21
|date=2004-05-26
|access-date=2013-05-26}}</ref> Peter Byrne of ''[[SF Weekly]]'' has stated that "the plain language of the Raker Act itself and experts who are familiar with the act (and have no stake in city politics) all agree: The city of San Francisco is not in violation of the Raker Act."<ref>{{Cite news|last=Byrne|first=Peter|title=Delusions of Power|url=http://www.sfweekly.com/2001-04-04/news/delusions-of-power/|publisher=San Francisco Weekly|date=2001-04-04}}</ref> [[Harold L. Ickes]], [[U.S. Department of the Interior|Secretary of the Interior]] in the late 1930s, said there was a violation of the Raker Act, but he and the city reached an agreement in 1945.{{sfn|Righter|2005|page=185}} In 2015, Restore Hetch Hetchy filed a complaint arguing that the construction of the dam had violated a provision in the constitution of California about water use, but the lawsuit was rejected by an appeals court and later the California State Supreme Court.<ref name=":1">{{Cite news|url=https://www.sfchronicle.com/travel/article/Could-Hetch-Hetchy-Valley-be-worth-100-billion-14270246.php|title=Could Hetch Hetchy Valley be worth $100 billion?|last=Thomas|first=Gregory|date=2019-08-01|website=San Francisco Chronicle|access-date=2019-10-01}}</ref>
[[File:Hetch Hetchy May 2011 001.jpg|thumb|right|View of reservoir and Kolana Rock]]

Preservation groups including the Sierra Club and [[Restore Hetch Hetchy]] state that draining Hetch Hetchy would open the valley back up to recreation, a right that should be provided to the American people because the reservoir is within the legal boundaries of a national park. They acknowledge that a concerted effort would have to be made to control the introduction of wildlife and tourism back into the valley in order to prevent destabilization of the ecosystem,<ref>{{cite web
|url=https://watershed.ucdavis.edu/tuolumne/includes/uploads/070511124225-66-DDC_HetchHetchy.pdf
|title=Three Square Miles of Open Space: Is It Enough?
|publisher=University of California Davis
|author=De Carion, Denis
|access-date=2013-05-26
|archive-date=2016-03-03
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160303174234/https://watershed.ucdavis.edu/tuolumne/includes/uploads/070511124225-66-DDC_HetchHetchy.pdf
|url-status=dead
}}</ref> and that it might be decades or even centuries before the valley could be returned to natural conditions.<ref>{{cite web
|url=https://vault.sierraclub.org/ca/hetchhetchy/nps_hh_restoration.pdf
|title=Alternatives for Restoration of Hetch Hetchy Valley Following Removal of the Dam and Reservoir
|publisher=Sierra Club
|access-date=2013-05-25}}</ref>

In 1987, the idea of razing the O'Shaughnessy Dam gained an adherent in [[Donald P. Hodel|Don Hodel]], [[Secretary]] of the [[United States Department of the Interior|Department of the Interior]] under [[President of the United States|President]] [[Ronald Reagan]].<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/6885
|title=Hetch Hetchy reclaimed: The dam downstream
|publisher=The Pulitzer Prizes
|date=2004-08-19
|author=Philp, Tom
|access-date=2013-06-02}}</ref> Hodel called for a study of the effect of tearing down the dam. The [[National Park Service]] concluded that two years after draining the valley, grasses would cover most of its floor and within 10 years, clumps of cone-bearing trees and some oaks would take root. Within 50 years, vegetative cover would be complete except for exposed rocky areas. In this unmanaged scenario, where nature is left to take hold in the valley, eventually a forest would grow, rather than the meadow being restored. However, the same NPS study also finds that with intensive management, an outcome in which "the entire valley would appear much as it did before construction of the reservoir" is feasible.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://vault.sierraclub.org/ca/hetchhetchy/nps_hh_restoration.pdf|last=Riegelhuth|first=Richard|author2=Botti, S. |author3=Keay, J. |title=Alternatives for restoration of Hetch Hetchy Valley following removal of the dam and reservoir page 15}}</ref>

The dam would not have to be completely removed; rather, it would only be necessary to cut a hole through the base in order to drain the water and restore natural flows of the Tuolumne River. Most of the dam would remain in place, both to avoid the enormous costs of demolition and removal, and to serve as a monument for the workers who built it.<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://backcountrypictures.com/bcp_writing_lies_beneath.pdf
|title=What Lies Beneath?
|publisher=Backcountry Pictures
|access-date=2013-05-25}}</ref> The water storage provided at Hetch Hetchy could be transferred into Lake Don Pedro lower on the Tuolumne River by raising the [[New Don Pedro Dam]] {{convert|30|ft|m|abbr=on}}. Water could be diverted into the Kirkwood and Moccasin Powerhouses using lower-impact [[diversion dam]]s, providing power generation on a seasonal basis, and the increased height, and thus [[hydraulic head]], at Don Pedro would also increase power generation there.<ref>{{cite magazine
|author=Nash, J. Madeline
|title=Is This Worth a Dam?
|magazine=[[Time (magazine)|Time]]
|date=2005-07-11
|url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1081382,00.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050714235313/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1081382,00.html|url-status=dead|archive-date=July 14, 2005}}</ref> Furthermore, the removal of O'Shaughnessy Dam would not require costly sediment control measures, as would be typical on most dam removal projects, because of the high quality of the Tuolumne River water – in the first 90 years since its construction, only around {{convert|2|in|cm|abbr=on}} of sediment had been deposited in Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, much less than most other dams.<ref>{{cite news |url=http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/geoengineering/what-happens-when-you-remove-a-dam-14845676 |title=What Happens When You Remove a Dam|author=Biba, Erin|date=2012-12-11 |work=Popular Mechanics|quote=The valley would be covered in about two inches of sediment, which is unusual to Hetch Hetchy; many dams collect large amounts of sediment, however the Tuolumne riverbed is mostly granite and erodes slowly.}}</ref> A 2019 study commissioned by Restore Hetch Hetchy argued that draining the reservoir and equipping the valley with a tourism infrastructure comparable to that of [[Yosemite Valley]] (which receives around 100 times as many visitors annually as Hetch Hetchy's 44,000) could result in a "recreational value" of up to $178 million per year, or possibly an overall economic value of up to $100 billion.<ref name=":1" />