WSP09067 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

OJJ323 11 Arthur Maass, Professor of Government, Harvard University "In recent years the techniques of analysis that have been used for the design of water resource programs have lagged significantly behind the changing objectives of society. In recent years the national objectives have been changing perhaps more rapidly than in the past. "Environmental quality and income redistribution to the poor and to depressed areas have become more important and national economic growth perhaps less so. Yet we have con- tinued to plan our water programs in terms of standards and criteria that place principal emphasis on national economic growth and to use this objective exclusively in the formal benefit- cost analysis. As a result, the water resource programs them- selves have come to be discredited in part. " ***** " . The reports on new standards and criteria that the Council's task force and staff prepared some many months ago were on the whole quite good in attacking the problems that have developed since World War II, as I have indicated, and in using new knowledge and new techniques that have been developed in the universities in the previous ten years to do so. "The document that is before us today is significantly less good in these regards. The Members of the Water Resources Council have botched things up. They have compromised the concept of multi-objective planning by eliminating a number of objectives, prohibiting the planning of projects for them, and by adopting a method of discounting future benefits that is both incorrect and inconsistent with multi-objective planning. " ***** "As for multiple objectives, the document in the Federal Register says that our government cannot plan a project for the purpose of saving human life, nor for public health and safety. '.. ." *****