EDITORIAL: Well water tax
If you have a well, brace for a $200 annual surcharge - meaning tax, since you have no choice but to pay it.
Senate Bill 5757 is making its way through the legislature to establish the new $200 surcharge to generate funds for the state Department of Ecology. The fees will go into a newly created Groundwater Management Account and will only be used for "programs relating to the management of groundwater resources, including groundwater mapping and resource assessment," according to the senate bill report.
Dewatering wells and investigative wells are not included.
The bill would add the surcharge to the fees for drilling new wells, increasing the cost to $400 or $500, depending on the size of the well.
But the bill would also apply the fee to any well "that could go to mapping and groundwater management for Ecology," that was drilled after July 1, 2005.
That covers a lot of wells in Eastern Washington.
The state Office of Financial Management predicts the bill, if passed, would cost taxpayers at least $1 million a year. Divided by $500 (the higher of the two fees), that would be an amazing amount of new wells ?- 200,000 new wells.
The purpose of the bill is to directly fund an Ecology program to help map wells, but it appears there is more to this than just creating a new revenue source. When Sen. Adam Kline, D-Seattle, and Sen. Sharon Nelson, representing Vashon Island in Puget Sound join forces with the Sierra Club, American Rivers (an environmental organization), the Center for Environmental Law and Policy (CELP), and Ecology, there must be another reason.
They presented testimony about the need to map wells, but they may have revealed their opinions by saying, "It can cost $10,000 to $100,000 or more to construct a well, so this is a modest increase ... There is concern about permit exempt well use," according to the senate bill report.
Our concern is how the surcharge could be applied to every well in Eastern Washington by Ecology because of the vague term "groundwater management."
We agree with citizen James Fritz, the Washington State Groundwater Association and Steve Lindstrom, representing Sno-King Water District Coalition, when they testified on the bill.
"This bill represents a targeted fee assault on the most commonly constructed water well, the small family owned domestic well ... The fee in this bill would represent a 125 percent increase over a domestic property owner's current state well fee cost. This bill needs more clarity on exactly where the monies are being diverted. The fees in this bill are far too excessive for Washington's rural property owners."