New fees for water use are coming from the Ukiah Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency.
For those who haven’t been following the news about groundwater in California, here is the situation in a nutshell: Because the groundwater in California’s Central Valley has been drastically overdrawn, leading to land subsidence and wells running dry, and because of multi-year droughts that may occur again, the State of California decided to pro-actively monitor the groundwater not only in the Central Valley, but throughout the rest of the state.
In 2014 California enacted the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) to establish local management of groundwater resources. Ten years later we now have state-mandated Groundwater Sustainability Agencies throughout California.
The Ukiah Valley Groundwater Basin, which covers Hopland in the south to Redwood Valley in the north, and ridgetop to ridgetop to the east and west, is generally in good condition. The local directors of the UVBGSA intend to keep it that way.
UVBGSA Director Adam Gaska has been instrumental in trying to keep the fees as low as possible. He negotiated for a much lower annual operating cost of approximately $600,000, down from the approximately $1,800,000 originally proposed. The UVBGSA called a Special Board Meeting on May 20 to approve revisions to the Rate and Fee Study conducted by Hansford Economic Consulting that was presented at the April Board Meeting. From the UVBGSA staff report:
Following a series of public workshops and meetings in early 2024, the Board approved a methodology presented in the Draft Fee Study at the April Board Meeting. Since that meeting, an alternative methodology for assessing landowners in Group 2 was suggested by Director Gaska. This methodology has been vetted with GSA Staff and HEC and has been determined to be an efficient modification to what was presented and approved in April. HEC will present the proposed modification at the May 20, 2024 Special Meeting to receive Board direction prior to a fee resolution being brought forth at the June 13, 2024 Board Meeting.
The May 15, 2024 Regulatory Fee Study prepared by Hansford Economic Consulting, states:
The UVBGSA regulatory fee described in this report is being adopted pursuant to Water Code Section 10730, which follows the fee adoption requirements for regulatory fees under Proposition 26. The fee being considered in this report is exempt from voter approval, as it is not a tax pursuant to California Constitution Article XIIIC (Proposition 26, Section 1(e)(3)). The fee may be charged to pay for “reasonable costs” of a regulatory program.
The fees are made up of two parts:
- Part 1 is a $4.06 fee per acre for land in the UVBGSA boundary. This will go on the property tax bills. Federal properties and tribal properties held in trust by the Federal government are exempt.
- Part 2 is more complicated, and is divided into 4 groups:
- GROUP 1 PUBLIC WATER SYSTEMS – fee of $0.1352 per 1,000 gallons extracted. Domestic customers of water companies, such as Redwood Valley County Water District, will see only a few dollars added to their monthly bill.
- GROUP 2 CROP LAND – fee of $32.75 Per Cropped Acre. This is vineyards, orchards, and other crops. Group 2 will pay the most, as they use the most water.
- GROUP 3 IMPROVED PROPERTIES -fee of $35.04 Per Acre of Entire Parcel. Residential group 3 properties not growing commercial crops are capped at 0.5 acres. This should not be too burdensome.
- GROUP 4 ALL OTHER – (No part 2 fees) $0.00 Per Acre of Entire Parcel – this applies to rangeland and recreational land.
Group 2 is going to be hit the hardest with fees. Grape prices are down, and the wine business is slow. These fees are significant. Farmers will most likely pass on these extra fees to their customers, which means that produce and wine will be more expensive for everybody. Gaska’s revision to the fee study was to limit the fees to “cropped acres,” instead of “total acres.” The California Department of Water Resources will monitor planted acres by satellite, rather than asking the county assessor to provide the data, which will change depending on what is planted every year.
For a landowner with 100 acres, but only 50 of them planted, instead of paying $3,275 in annual fees for 100 acres at $32.75 per acre, they will only pay $1,637.50 for the 50 cropped acres, plus $406 for the $4.06 per acre charge. It is still a hefty annual increase.
The fee study calls for either a 4% or CPI price adjustment annually. This was built in as a placeholder, and fees will not necessarily go up every year. The County recently raised all department fees for the first time in many years, resulting in a huge price increase for building permits, etc. The Rate and Fee Study calls for annual examination of the fees to avoid such a situation.
The UVBGSA fees are not the end of water price increases. At this time we have no idea what water users who are dependent on the Potter Valley Project will end up paying after PG&E abandons the project.
The Eel-Russian Facility group that is trying to take over a revised Potter Valley diversion will need to charge users more than they are currently paying, but that price has not yet been determined.
The Board voted to approve the draft Fee Study report with Alternative Fee Methodology for Group 2, and to direct GSA staff to bring a fee resolution to the Board at the June 13, 2024 Board Meeting.
Just another fee for the skyvis falling, hand wringing, forelock tugging desk jockeys to piss away on useless bureaucratic feel good clap trap. Measure B redux? What exactly will the money be used for?
Our groundwater sustainability plan was approved by the state. The gist of it is that we have to prove we are sustainably managing our groundwater and we are guilty until we prove ourselves innocent. We are doing that through monitoring, collecting more data on conditions by doing a well inventory and a study on how our groundwater and surface water is connected.
Info on budgets and such can be found here.
https://ukiahvalleygroundwater.org/
So in honest transparency what is your salary yearly to oversee this agency and how many staff members will the agency employ in total. Secondly what qualifications do you have to oversee this agency IE similar tasks at previous place of employment and what qualifies someone to seek employment as supporting staff or will it to fall to the already overtasked county agriculture department or God forbid permits department.
So why not call for a second interview soon before these fee structures are put in place to inform us your employer as a public agency who and exactly what you’ll be doing with constituent funding.
I do not get paid to serve in the board nor do any other directors. The GSA is managed by West Yost, a water engineering firm based in Davis that manages a few GSA’s including 3 in Sonoma County.
The GSA has been funded by the City of Ukiah, County of Mendocino, Russian River Flood Control and URRWA ( a JPA of water districts). We have been in the process of doing the rate and fee study for about a year now. The proposed 5 year budget has been brought down by 2/3’s compared to what West Yost initially proposed, primarily through my personal efforts. Most of our budget is going toward the minimum monitoring reports required by the state.
We have had 2 public meetings presenting the proposed budget and rate structure. Information on our budget, fee’s, etc can be found here.
https://ukiahvalleygroundwater.org/
The proposed budget was brought down primarily by your efforts Adam? I attended a couple of the public meetings, where people who attended objected to both the large budget, and the ridiculous fees with no justification or benefits to landowners. I hope our objections were of prime concern to you and the GSA board and may have been the prime reason the budget was reduced.
Hound
1. Some central valley land has subsided >16ft due to overpumping of geoundwater.
Wells can run dry. Under pressure of sustained pumping, at greater than the recharge rate, they may collapse.
Neighbors can pump another neighbor’s well dry.
These issues are far more common right here in S Mendo than most can fathom. I’ve seen many, many fail, myself, due to abuse or “light” use in bad conditions.
No water means a property is red tagged against occupancy and becomes near impossible to sell.
The Groundwater Sustainability Agency is another bureaucratic liability imposed on the citizens with little to no benefits. This should be an eye opening experience to the over reach of all government and its agencies. First to be able to cut $1.2 million from the original annual budget and still operate effectively shows what kind of waste and corruption is involved in these types of agencies. People should be outraged that this was trying to get pushed through with no itemized accounting of where the original budget numbers came from. Where was the $1.2million going? Why such a drastic cut? Was this just a money grab for the groundwater agency with no checks and balances in place and they were caught? We the citizens have no guarantee that the budget in years to come will not grow out of hand with no limits imposed. There is no clear evidence that the Ukiah Valley Groundwater Basin is being over drafted and if that is a concern just another reason why we must save the crucial water storage we no have in place and look at add more water storage in our county and state so the groundwater is not over taxed. As for farmers many of these individuals have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars building surface water storage ponds and use no groundwater at all. These agricultural ponds are filled with water from rivers or runoff during rainy season “ high flow times” and held for dryer parts of the year and sometimes for several seasons with no groundwater being pumped for crop irrigation. To assess a fee on these individuals who have worked diligently to reduce groundwater extraction or completely eliminate the need with their own capital is ludicrous. What’s to say that farmers will not start using more groundwater since they are being charged for it whether they use it or not. This state mandated agency is just another example of the state tightening is grip of total control of its people. If you control water, whether by fees, taxes or fear tactics of running out, you control all power. Water is power and government knows this all too well. This is not meant to be disrespectful in anyway just hope it might shed some light and open some eyes to the on going attempt of government, especially in California, to leverage total control of the people.
Yes, MMCGA, the Groundwater Sustainability Agency is another bureaucratic liability imposed on the citizens with little to no benefits. It is an over reach of our State and local agencies. The GSA’s consultant came up with a proposed $1.2 million budget, probably knowing there would be objections in the public meetings and then end up with a lower budget they planned for anyway. The GSA’s proposed fee is not fair to farmers, nor is it fair to domestic customers. We, the Ukiah Valley basin, does NOT have a shortage of groundwater. And there is nothing the Board of the GSA is planning to do, which would put water into the groundwater (are they going to stick straws into the ground and pump water in? From where?) We, the people/residents, don’t get to vote on this tax (oh, they call it a fee instead). If there was a tea shipment involved in this, I’d be throwing it into the Lake.
I think the UVBGSA is setting them up for a lawsuit by not taking these costs for the program to the voters. The article saying that the “fees” are not subject to voter approval because they are a “fee” and not a “tax”. Prop 26, approved by voters in November 2010 requires new taxes be subject to voter approval. There are just 7 narrow, specific situations when this is the case. Per the article above, they are saying UVBGSA “fees” fall into this one:
(3) A charge imposed for the reasonable regulatory
costs to a local government for issuing licenses and
permits, performing investigations, inspections, and
audits, enforcing agricultural marketing orders, and the
administrative enforcement and adjudication thereof.
If you break down each one of those individually, I just don’t think UVBGSA’s role and structure fits any of those. At best you might have “inspections and audits”, but I’m not so sure that would make it through a legal battle.
The fact is, everyone will be paying a lot more money to a new government program, and at the end of the day, this program will do nothing to create more water falling from the sky. It will however give some people some very cush jobs, government benefits, and government pensions all in the name of saving our water, which we’ve been able to make drastic improvements with by education and outreach.
Tread lightly trying to sneak this around any voter approval requirement, as the UVBGSA’s interpretation of the law may differ from those in a court room.
The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) was passed in 2014 by the state legislature and mandated that groundwater basins be managed sustainably. Our option is to either exercise local control by taking the initiative to form our own GSA to meet state requirements or the state will do it for us.
Some GSA’S have already been put on probation. The state is taking control and assessing fees without public input.
I completely get that, and if I were to bet on it, I bet that at least one of those instances will get legally challenged. Everyone can have their own interpretation of how a law can or should be interested. Some are pretty clear cut, and some are pretty vague. In either case, a judge or jury depending on the circumstances gets to be the final say in that interpretation.
If you look at something like groundwater that has been around and been utilized by humans for thousands of years, since before our nation become a nation, to now suddenly have a “fee” for the administration of its oversight attached to it that is passed onto the public on their property taxes, I just don’t think that would hold up in a legal challenge. I may be wrong, but I also may be right. Give it a few years and we’ll see what ends up happening. I can tell you this with certainty-
When (not if, because mark my words it will) the “fee” that was automatically imposed on residents elsewhere in CA gets challenged, and IF it is decided to be an unconstitutional implementation of a tax, UVGBSA, and all the GBSA’s won’t even get a say. They will lose their income by way of the legal decision that occurred elsewhere.
Groundwater management is not new. California is the last western state to regulate it. It is heavily regulated in other states.
Tulare Lake basin was put on probation and their local Farm Bureau is suing the water district that manages the GSA for not doing enough to manage it well.
If our local GSA is shot down, the state will regulate and that won’t likely be shot down. Idaho just recently issued a heavy curtailment.
https://idahocapitalsun.com/2024/05/30/idaho-department-of-water-resources-director-issues-water-curtailment-order/
We are not Idaho, Adam. Where are you planning to build reservoirs for water storage for Redwood and Ukiah Valley?
Thank you Adam Gaska!
What are the proposed uses for the $1.173M in PMA fees collected over the next 5 years? These are in addition to the 25% reserve over forecasted operating expense held each year.
2025 Forecasted Expenses(Table 24):
$138,000 – Core administration
$130,000 – DWR data collection and reporting
$113,000 – PMA driven administration
$160,000 – PMA costs[2]
[2] May be spent on PMAs, added to reserves, or used for any other purpose of the GSA.
$18,000 – Bad debt
$145,500 – estimated ending balance
$418,500(70% of 2025 budget) is allocated to PMAs and reserves. This grows to $554,000 and 78% of the annual budget by 2029.
The use of PMA costs should be better defined and explained to the customer base as such a high percentage of the fees collected that fall outside core administration and data monitoring/reporting. How is this keeping costs down?