WSP07510

• File Number: 8200.760
• Description: Yampa River General
• State: CO
• Basin: Yampa/White
• Water Division: 6
• Date: 1/1/1981
• Author: USGS
• Title: Assessments of Impacts of Proposed Coal-Resource and Related Economic Development on Water Resources - Yampa River Basin - Colorado and Wyoming - A Summary - 1981
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Report/Study

residuals-management system to achieve a par-
ticular environmental objective. Conversely. an ef-
ficient approach to environmental management
may require considerably larger efforts in under-
standing the response of the environment to the
direct and indirect effects of various actions. The
social benefits of customized residuals-manage-
ment programs may be quite large, but the benefits
of such approaches to the regulatory and legislative
bodies apparently has not been great enough to
warrant serious consideration in most cases.
At the legislative level of decisionmaking. con-
flicting viewpoints are brought to compromise by
the usual techniques of representative govern-
ments; vote trading, logrolling, coercion, etc.
(Haefele, 1971), in a decision making process that
can be characterized as political accommodation.
This has a tendency to broaden the scope of
tradeoffs to unrelated issues. The various sides to
an issue may attempt to garner support via vote
trading. which effectively extends coalitions into
somewhat unusual areas of concern. By its involve-
ment in decision making, the legislative body may
increase the number of parties to the decision and
increase the scope of the options available. To
achieve a resolution that both sides find accep-
table, the legislative body may sweeten the com-
promise solution through ,the infusion of public
funds to lessen adverse impacts.
The information requirements for political ac-
commodation are considerably different than for
other decisionmaking processes. Legislatures do
not have the expertise or time to thoroughly under-
stand the technicalities or details of the issues in-
volved. Rather, they often rely on their clientele's
desires rather than hard information as a basis for
decisionmaking. What information they do utilize
must, of necessity, be very compressed, simplified,
and aggregated. Information in raw forms. or that
is not distilled to its essence for the decision at
hand, is not likely to be utilized.
Suggestions have been made by some-par-
ticularly economists-that the solution to environ-
mental problems lies In a strict definition of
property rights and the development of a
marketing system in those rights. "Rights-to-
pollute" could be established for particular receiv-
ing media and they could be exchanged like any
other commodity. The well-known ability of the
marketplace to, under certain conditions, opti-
mally allocate resources could be used. A produc-

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tive process generating residuals could then make
its optimal decision concerning the level of
residuals modification and amount of "rights" to
buy. Environmental interests could similarly enter
the marketplace and bid on these rights and leave
them unexercised. There are some very real
problems with a system of decisionmaking by a
marketplace process, particularly with respect to
the public-goods nature of environmental ameni-
ties. The possibilities for efficiently achieving en-
vironmental objectives by such systems, however,
has intrigued economists for some time. In this
more restrictive application of the method, infor-
mation is simply needed to arrive at the amount of
"rights" to be established to meet the specified en-
vironmental objectives. This may simply be en-
vironmental results that link loadings to ambient
environmental quality. or possibly also include
economic analyses to estimate the optimal level of
environmental quality, considering the costs of
residuals treatment in relation to the benefits from
improved environmental quality.
As the environmental decisionmaking process
evolves, the amount, kind. and nature of the infor-
mation supplied to it must change if it is to remain
relevant. The use of technical information purely
for design efficiency has given way to its use for
assessing a wide range of cause-and-effects rela-
tionships related to energy development. Such as-
sessments also must be evaluated by public and in-
terest groups.
The less technically specialized individual needs
to have the technical material presented in a
form which is accurate yet comprehensible at
his technical level. Communication of technical
knowledge thus becomes more difficult and more
important. Information and data developed from
the Yampa River basin assessment have been and
are being used for decisionmaking. Although the
nature of the decisions being made may be
somewhat unique to this basin and to the present
condition of the environmental decisionmaking
process, it may be informative to describe some of
the specific uses that have been made of informa-
tIon developed in this study. The remainder of this
chapter describes some examples of the uses of
technical data and information.
As a result of recently adopted Federal surface-
mining regulations (Public Law 95-87), local coal-
mine operators are using surface-water-quality
data obtained during the assessment to fulfill cer-

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