It's been a longtime requirement in Bayfield for land developers to donate water rights to the town to serve the development. On March 3, town trustees reviewed a computer model to calculate fees in lieu of water rights for entities that don't have water rights.
"This is a model to allow the town to develop an appropriate fee," Ryan Huggins from Wright Water Engineers said. The fee is intended to cover "the long term costs of acquiring and developing new water rights," she said. "This could be an existing development that wants to annex, or a new development."
She continued, "The first thing is to figure what the new water demand will be" based on equivalent residential units (EQRs). "The town has that for sewer but not for water."
Huggins said, "If the developer doesn't have water rights, we assume all new supply would be leased from Pine River Irrigation District. If they do have rights to give, that reduces but doesn't eliminate the amount leased from PRID. There are legal fees to convert rights (from irrigation to municipal use), and we don't want the town to be stuck with that."
This is all assuming water is available to lease from Vallecito, but Huggins said, "If you really want a firm supply, it seems like a good idea to get that now."
To determine the fee, town staff will plug in the proposed number of units in the development, the number of Los Pinos and Schroder shares the developer has to convey, and the computer model sorts through a lot of variables and provides a cost per unit.
For a 300 unit project with no water rights, the developer would have to pay $340,000, Huggins said.
Town Manager Chris La May said, "The land use code stipulates a cash in lieu fee. It assumes there's a fee schedule. In most cases, this will be at the time of annexation. That's when you have the greatest opportunity to negotiate. If the developer has more water rights than the EQR schedule requires, there's still a fee for the cost of conversion. We could take additional shares in trade for that."
La May said that as proposed, the fee would be $1,135 per unit on a development that doesn't have rights in the Los Pinos or Schroder ditches. Those are the ditches that the town has rights in.
"Of all the fees we assess, this is probably the most important because it's water," La May said.
Trustees didn't take any action on the model. Staff will come back with an ordinance to adopt the fee model.
