Pájaro River Watershed Flood Protection Plan - The Pajaro River ...

Appendix 3: Streambank Property Owners, San Benito River (see separate file)
Appendix 7: Mines in the San Benito County Permit files, 2003 (see separate file)
Appendix 8: Economic and Socioeconomic considerations
Introduction
Economic considerations for the Pájaro Watershed are almost as
complex as the geological issues. Because the lower Pájaro Valley is cooled by
fog in the summer, yet remains under marine influence all winter, the field
survey crews recognized it in 1853-54 as an unusually favorable agricultural
region (Wm. Johnson, 1854 US Coast Survey). High value crops can be grown
and harvested all year in the rich Lake San Benito silt soils. Agricultural
drainage tiles were installed at the beginning of the 20 th Century to enhance
winter production in the lowermost part of the valley where waterlogging of soils
could occur during the winter. By 1950 the flood-tolerant fruit tree and nut crops
were being cut down in favor of much more valuable row crops. With the local
selective breeding of berry varieties adapted to high production in morning fog
sites, there was strong economic pressure to shift to very high value crops such
as strawberries and cut flowers.
Agriculture in the Lower Pájaro Valley is thus very different than in most
agricultural areas of the world. In the Pájaro, it pays to tear down houses and
parking lots and plant crops. Agricultural property has among the highest
returns on investment as are found anywhere. This means that valuation of
flood protection works cannot be treated as they would be for cropland in Iowa
or Indiana. It further means that seasonal flooding of silt across fields, as is
welcomed throughout most of the world, has a high cost to farmers in the
Pájaro. Thus, cost-benefit analyses that must be accomplished for federal flood
protection works have to be based on an entirely different metric than elsewhere
in the United States.
We attempted to disaggregate the Corps’ comparative cost figures for the
scenarios that were released to the public as this report was being written.
Despite repeated requests to the Corps’ offices in San Francisco, none of the
lumped categories for cost assessment were provided to us. In no public
meetings that we attended were these various cost categories explained or
questioned. We thus cannot accurately estimate the cost-savings that are
inherent in the upstream flood storage options presented here.
But we take the position that however insubstantially based may be the
Corps’ numbers, we can state that our cost estimate for a reduction of 4 feet in
the height of the 100-year flood at Murphy’s Crossing in the Lower Valley is less
costly. That is, the cost of the top 4-feet of flood protective works envisioned by
the Corps’ in their scenarios is more expensive than our zero-public-cost
upstream flood storage restoration alternative.
DRAFT 7/22/03
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Pájaro Watershed Flood Management