The California Water Foundation has released a report – Know Your Options: A Guide to Forming Groundwater Sustainability Agencies” which is authored by Valerie Kincaid and Ryan Stager of O’Laughlin and Paris LLP.

“Know Your Options” is meant to provide local agencies and interested stakeholders with a resource for groundwater sustainability agency (GSA) formation and coordination under SGMA.  It focuses on memorandums of agreement (MOAs) and joint powers agreements (JPAs), two legal arrangements mentioned in SGMA that can be used by local agencies for GSA formation and groundwater sustainability plan (GSP) development and implementation. To provide examples, the Guide examines relevant case studies of actual MOAs and JPAs to highlight how past agreements have navigated the discussed topics. Finally, the Guide provides templates for both an MOA for GSAs coordinating their respective GSPs, and a JPA for local agencies to use for creating a JPA to serve as a GSA. These template agreements may help agencies organizing management structures to better identify the challenges of governance and structure coordination to meet these challenges.