Salter Brook Trout: What Is, What Was, And What Still Could Be. Pt. 3

Economics

I don’t like this part, honestly. I don’t like this part because I think it loses sight of the main reason this re-zoning and development shouldn’t happen. Unfortunately, the economic side is what would most likely change the average Wareham resident’s mind about NOTOS’ rezoning proposal. As it turns out, there are a number of reasons why it would be economically smart to develop the land as it is presently zoned for single-family homes, rather than rezoning it for something that would demand much more water use and create more polluted runnoff.

First of all, any sort of large hospitality, recreation and entertainment district as NOTOS is proposing would cause increased traffic to an area currently not prepared for it. This would almost certainly demand costly infrastructural changes and improvements. One of the Wareham town board members expressed hope that the current presidential administration would be supportive of infrastructure grants, but hedging on this seems like too much of a risk.

The economic viability of developing the land as currently zoned was examined in a report by FXM Associates, and this report is what has been used as the primary determination of the economic viability of re-zoning and development. It determined substantial losses if the land were developed for single-family housing. This was re-examined in a report by Dr. Frederic Jennings, and the findings differed hugely. The FXM Associates evaluation seems to have been very flawed. 

Directly from the report by Dr. Jennings: 

“First, the number of new homes is overstated; 90 homes cannot be placed on a 275-acre parcel zoned for 3-acre lots and still leave room for roads and other facilities. Second, taking the average value of existing homes as a benchmark for the taxable value of new homes understates their tax revenue impacts. Third, the FXM analysis also exaggerated people per household to overstate their cost effects. Fourth, the scaling up of average cost per student to determine the cost impact of new enrollments is only valid were there no fixed costs in education! Fifth, excess capacity (from falling enrollments in Wareham’s schools) has inflated the average cost per student (due to significant fixed costs and COVID-19), which has further biased these cost effects upward. Sixth, the FXM measure of non-school costs, by scaling average residential use costs for municipal services upward, suffers from the same mistake of assuming no fixed costs in the provision of town services, so biases these costs upward as well.” 

Frederic B. Jennings Jr., Econologics, Ph.D 

Final Economic Analysis of

The Wareham Re-Zoning Plan

Proposed By The NOTOS Group

30 March 2021

Page 3

I certainly am not an expert in anything economic, but it looks to me like there are issues with this re-zoning outside of its ecological impacts. 

My opinion, though, is that I shouldn’t have to leverage these economic values to get my point across. No matter how this land in Wareham gets developed, it will have negative impacts on sensitive ecosystems. That should be enough, but alas it is not. The general public thinks of themselves first- and they aren’t completely wrong to do so. People are desperate. They were desperate before this pandemic and they are certainly more desperate now. This makes it far too easy for people with a little bit of power and money to leverage the public away from their own intentions.  All too often this ends up hurting both people and the natural world. Short term gain dominates the political and economic atmosphere in this country now. The economic viability of the sort of development NOTOS is proposing is questionable at best and could very likely end up being costly for Wareham. This sort of thing just hurts the working class and frankly everyone that isn’t obscenely wealthy. 

Wareham has a pretty simple choice. Save a beautiful, unique, and rare piece of land, or take a risk on something data suggests won’t benefit the town in the way NOTOS is selling it. With just one day on the clock, I hope they make the right decision. 

Comment from Dr. Fred Jennings: A lot of my work over the past 40 years has involved exploring the economic implications of the important difference between short-term myopic thinking and long-term broader perspectives. The reason that I got interested in ecological economics is because ecological issues are mostly based on very long-term and enduring consequences, while economic concerns are mostly short-term in character, involving immediate profit incentives, current impacts, and short-term effects. As Lord John Maynard Keynes famously said: “In the long run, we are dead.” And economists – even when they deal with long-term effects (usually in the context of capital accumulation and investment opportunities) – routinely discount future returns so they don’t count their full weight in the future once collapsed back down into “present value” terms. Some ecological economists have advocated a zero discount rate for this reason, though the implication of doing that is that if a natural resource has ANY durably positive value at all, then its non-discounted present value will be infinite, which also does not make a lot of sense unless you are arguing that Nature is sacred and so we shouldn’t disturb it at all (which I wouldn’t totally dismiss as an unreasonable argument, actually). But my point is a less dramatic one: that we should use very low discount rates for ecological services, while economists tend to use much higher discount rates for future returns and/or ecological impacts. So economists’ planning horizons and foresight tend to be much shorter and narrower than the ecologists’ planning horizons need to be. Your point, therefore, is a good one with which I wholly agree: the NOTOS Group proposal is focused on immediate financial benefits at the expense of very long-term ecological losses (that probably far outweigh those quick gains, if counted)…

Until next time, 

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

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Edited by Dr. Frederic B. Jennings and Cheyenne Terrien