8020

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 8020
• Author: Horak, G. C.
• Title: Proceedings of the Symposium on Mitigating Developmental Impacts on Fish and Wildlife.
• USFW Year: 1979.
• USFW - Doc Type: March 1979.
• Copyright Material: NO

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For these projects the longest lag period to completion was eight years from
the start of the project and the median lag time was five years. Fryingpan-
Arkansas, as noted above, had no lag.
For the one hundred and seventeen entries on Table 5, fish and wildlife
mitigation is in a lag position in seventy-three cases. In 62% of the data
years listed, fish and wildlife mitigation was being completed at a s10wer
rate than the project. In some instances, fish and wildlife mitigation fund-
ing lags behind other project purposes because mitigation cannot be imple-
mented until other project goals are reached, although it is assumed that
to a great extent land may be bought and preliminary construction completed,
simultaneously with the action taken on other project purposes. However,
when expenditures on the project are complete, expenditures on the mitigatory
portion are not always complete. Therefore, the argument that taking action
on fish and wildlife mitigation plans is contingent on the completion of
other project goals may have some validity in individual cases, but its
applicability as a general proposition is questionable.
Robert H. Haveman has stated that water resource project ex ante cost
estimates have rarely equalled ex post estimates (7). A review of the data
for these 12 projects demonstrates that,. as a rule, fish and wildlife measures
cost estimations increase substantially after the initial estimation (due to
the fact that it usually represents a small segment of total project cost and
is, in most cases, not considered until after the project is designed)(3). It
is at this point in the process that environmental interest groups exert the
most pressure against project construction.
Not all mitigation measures involve expenditures. The degree of imple-
mentation of non-expenditure measures such as minimum flows or pools can be
particularly hard to trace. Usually investigators have relied on the work of
field staff of the involved agencies. This is less than satisfactory, since

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