LSI 2010 NRD Santa Fe final conference binder 072110.pdf

William H. Desvousges of W. H. Desvousges & Associates Speaker 27: 3
PLAINTIFF’S APPROACH
The Plaintiff’s expert does an assessment of groundwater damages using REA.
REA is equivalent to Habitat Equivalency Analysis (HEA) in that it is used as a tool to
scale compensatory restoration using a services-to-services approach. The difference
being that HEA uses a habitat metric, such as acres of land, and applies a change in
services to that habitat such as a percent reduction in services as a result of an injury.
REA typically uses a resource metric that has had a population or quantity change
rather than a quality change as a metric. For example, an injury to a stream may have
caused a reduction in the fish population. The number of fish in the stream reflects the
reduction in services in the stream that resulted from a reduction in the quality of the
habitat. Improvements in habitat at the site or elsewhere may increase the populations
of fish and provide compensatory restoration. The number of fish produced through
compensatory restoration is scaled with the number of fish lost as a result of the injury.
The basis for the analysis in REA is balancing the lost services with compensatory
services over time to make the public whole for the injury.
However, the Plaintiff’s expert does not use REA in the usual manner. In the
Plaintiff’s expert’s analysis, REA is used to equate gallons of injured groundwater to
gallons of water found in preserved land. The expert does not assess the effect of the
injury on groundwater services, the first step in any damage assessment. Instead, he
measures the total volume of groundwater and assumes a 100 percent service loss.
He then uses REA to estimate the amount of land that would contain an equivalent
amount of groundwater that could be purchased for compensation. He used the
average cost of acquiring land in the area multiplied by the number of acres that results
from his calculations as the basis for damages. Figure 1 shows how the Plaintiff’s
expert’s assessment differs from the steps used in a proper assessment.
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Law Seminars International | Natural Resource Damages | 07/16/10 in Santa Fe, NM