1. Groundwater Fee Now Adopted — Pre-Billing Corrections Underway for Tier 2 Ag Fees The YSGA adopted a two-tier groundwater fee at its May 18 meeting. Tier 1 covers all properties in the subbasin for regulatory compliance costs; Tier 2 charges water users, with 95% of costs allocated to agriculture and 5% to domestic users. Ag fees differ based on whether a property is inside or outside an irrigation/reclamation district. Staff have opened a pre-billing corrections process for Tier 2 — approximately 50 landowners have submitted requests to reclassify roughly 5,100 acres of grazing/dry land that satellites incorrectly tagged as cropped. An updated interactive parcel map is now live on the YSGA website (under Governance → Funding) where growers can look up their parcel and see how the fee applies. Staff said they would develop an estimated cost and process for analyzing alternative fee structures for Clarksburg-area landowners and dry land farmers before the 2028 fee cycle — no changes have been made yet, and no Board action was taken on this item at this meeting.
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