Boyd: Economic advantages of [Hudson] dredging exaggerated

Daily Gazette, The (Schenectady, NY)

August 26, 2001
Section: Opinion
Edition: Schenectady Albany; Final
Page: F-01


Economic advantages of dredging exaggerated
GORDON BOYD For The Sunday Gazette
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's decision to move ahead with environmental dredging of PCBs from the upper Hudson River has not brought an end to the debate, nor has it prevented the seemingly victorious lower Hudson environmentalists from making wild and crazy claims about what all this means.

One recent event that caught my eye was staged by the environmental group Clearwater, which held a press conference July 30 in Troy to promote the release of an "economic impact" study of the dredging project.
The study, performed for Clearwater by a consulting firm, KLIOS, touts the job-creating benefits of the dredging project, which is expected to cost $460 million, according to EPA.
Clearwater, for its part, sees this as a tremendous boon to our benighted region.
"You just can't spend $460 million in a relatively small, poor, post-industrial, post-agrarian region and not have it have some economic benefit" said Clearwater's executive director, Andrew Mele, according to local press reports.
Post-agrarian? Poor? Who's this guy's PR adviser? Why is he making such statements when he should be trying to find common ground in the community where the dredging and environmental devastation will take place?
Mr. Mele must be unaware that only about half of the $460 million will be spent anywhere near Saratoga and Washington counties because so much will go for the likes of rail haul and landfill fees in Texas.
Leaving that aside, since when did Saratoga and Washington counties become post-agrarian? Or poor?
KLIOS/Clearwater touts 4,500 new direct and indirect jobs and $800 million in "economic rewards" that will rain down like manna on our poor, post-agrarian local economy.
Look at numbers
Drawn by this statement in local news reports, I downloaded the KLIOS study and got out my trusty calculator.
Page 18. KLIOS states that the impact of the proposed cleanup project on the regional economy between 2003 and 2008 (the period planned for the actual dredging) will include 3,543 new direct jobs drawing on $88.5 million in new direct wages.
Is it really going to take more than 3,500 people to get the PCBs out of the river?
The report does not show how KLIOS modeled this out, but it looks to me as though they either made a mistake or there's a big explanation missing.
KLIOS does not explain how $88.5 million pays 3,543 workers a living wage, unless it is assumed EPA spends the money in one year, at the rate of about $25,000 per job, which, if benefits are backed out, amounts to gross salaries of only about $18,000. But these are supposed to be union jobs, right? $35,000 and up, plus benefits.
In fact, the EPA plan spends $88.5 million on wages over five years, not one. The average payroll is only $17.7 million per year. At $25,000 per job, that pays for 709 jobs, not 3,543. At union scale, the number of jobs is more like 300 to 400, which sounds about right to me for a project of this scale.
Of course, if these are only six-month
See CLEARWATER, Page F4
Clearwater must mean magic money
Continued from Page F1
jobs, because there's no dredging during the winter, then $25,000 for a half year makes more sense, but then KLIOS is counting all 709 jobs as new jobs each of the five years. Thus each worker on the dredging project after five years would have had five jobs, not one. And 709 workers would have had just about 3,543 jobs after five years of dredging.
Or . . . perhaps KLIOS was thinking that in this small, poor, community of ours, you actually could create 3,543 jobs with $17.7 million each year, in which case, KLIOS, Clearwater and Mr. Mele must think that thousands of us post-agrarian hunter-gatherers around here will put down our spears and clubs and march right over to Schuylerville to get one o' them $5,000-per-year jobs that EPA is offering. Fat City.
Anyway, it is math like that that puffs KLIOS's economic benefit up to $800 million Gross Regional Product from the direct spending ordered by EPA. If local economies could magically create $800 million out of spending $17 million per year, life would be pretty good in upstate New York. Maybe our local governments should hire KLIOS to see how it can be done.
The PCB dredging project will devastate the upper Hudson valley, as river bottom and miles of shoreline will be excavated, dewatered and hauled away, then replaced with a million tons of locally strip-mined sand and gravel. When complete, the fish will still not be free of contamination for at least 60 years, and therefore not fit for unrestricted human consumption. We know this from the EPA's plan.
We know that the project will require a few dozen engineers and laborers to operate, but it is hard to get excited about new jobs when the economy hereabouts is suffering from a labor shortage anyway.
Clearwater has done a great job over the years educating people of all ages about the conditions of the Hudson River and other waters in the Eastern United States. Its campaigns to stop pollution have had a big impact.
However, Clearwater has not seen fit to apply the same standard of technical proficiency or explanation for this alleged economic impact study that they would require for their environmental analyses. They have used their environmental credibility to make deceptive claims about what happens to dollars and jobs, i.e. people's livelihoods.
EPA is soon to start the process of siting the two dewatering facilities needed for the project, possibly seizing land by eminent domain and overriding local zoning codes. Mele's remarks and Clearwater's report can only further inflame sentiments in the Upper Hudson community, the opposite of what they should be trying to achieve at this stage.
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Gordon Boyd lives in Saratoga Springs and is a regular contributor to the Sunday Opinion section.

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