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Wyandotte Creek GSA considers fee study after Vina GSA drafts two‑part charge
Summary
GSA staff reported that neighboring Vina GSA approved a draft two‑part fee structure; the Wyandotte Creek board asked staff to have a consultant run cost estimates and scenarios using available grant funds before deciding whether to pursue a similar approach.
At the March 20 meeting, GSA Program Manager Dylan McGregor briefed the board on a fee structure recently drafted by the Vina Groundwater Sustainability Agency and asked whether Wyandotte Creek should consider a similar approach.
McGregor said Vina's draft is a two‑part fee: a uniform parcel fee to cover basic GSA governance and administrative costs, and a second component tied to SGMA monitoring and reporting costs that is apportioned by use (in Vina's case, roughly 90% of that second component is allocated to agricultural groundwater use and 10% to municipal and domestic uses). McGregor said Vina's approach charges cropped acreage for the agricultural portion and exempts rangeland from the second component so rangeland owners pay only the uniform parcel fee. "The part 1 fee ... is a parcel fee. Mhmm. Just a uniform regardless of what kind of water use on there," McGregor said.
McGregor told the board that Wyandotte Creek has about $100,000 in grant funds that could be used to run a consultant analysis and that the GSA budgets roughly $20,000 a year for fee‑study work. Board members and staff discussed stakeholder concerns already raised by rangeland owners in the adjacent Vina subbasin, and several board members said they preferred to "look at it" and see numerical scenarios before deciding whether to pursue a fee report for Wyandotte Creek.
Staff and one board member noted that the fee under discussion is a SGMA regulatory fee rather than a Proposition 218 parcel tax and therefore would follow a public‑hearing and notice process rather than a Proposition 218 protest hearing; the transcript records the procedural distinction during the discussion. McGregor recommended asking the same consultant that completed the Vina analysis to run cost estimates for Wyandotte Creek because the consultant already has much of the needed data.
By consensus the board directed staff to ask the consultant to run a short cost estimate/scenario analysis to show what a similar two‑part fee would look like for Wyandotte Creek. Staff said the consultant work could be executed as a small task order and returned to the board for discussion; board members requested a follow‑up at a future meeting. McGregor also reminded the board about administrative items: Form 700 filing deadlines (April 1) and an advisory committee meeting on April 3.
