Sharing the Costs of Humid Region Flood Control Investment

T HE title of this paper suggests the question: what, if any, characteristics of the humid regions have a unique impact on sharing costs of flood control investments? Would these characteristics impose any restrictions on or require extensions of conventional economic criteria for cost sharing? Certainly the contrast of the physical environment of the East with that of the arid West requires different techniques of water management. With a larger, more concentrated population, older and more extensively developed private investments, and the complex institutional commitments that have evolved with them, the means for achieving efficiency and equity in cost sharing also may not be the same as those that would apply in the arid West. In the East, the closer and more in-plains, storage areas, and water use demand that investments in stream management be scheduled and integrated with scrupulous observation of their impact both in the present and over time if acceptable levels of efficiency and standards of equity are to guide flood control investments.