Lower Bucks County Guide to Used Car Shopping

Ever buy a used car? You should avoid shopping for a used car at night. Some cars can look like real cream-puffs during the night, but when you see them by day, you wonder who switched last night’s cream-puff for the clunker now in front of you. And when you look at any used car, you have to keep reminding yourself that they are used, or you might just find yourself finding more and more wrong things.

Backers of Dark Hollow Dam, in Bucks County, remind me of someone looking at used cars at night. There under the lights of the lot, the dam alternative looks like a real cream-puff: sexy, sleek, the car you have always been dreaming about. Back behind it is the nonstructural alternative: plain, boxy and functional. But who wants that? Years ago, we were promised a sports car! The stakes are certainly higher when you are talking about flood protection, as opposed to used cars, but the same principles apply. None of the alternatives for the flooding on the lower Neshaminy Creek are perfect, but you better take a good hard look at the alternatives in daylight to see which is best.

The dam backers want to haggle about prices right off the bat. They are saying that the sticker price for the dam shouldn’t apply. The county paid $2 million for the land, so the stupid federal government shouldn’t include the market price of $10 million. And since the county already owns it, there shouldn’t be any land price included at all.

That makes the dam a great deal, right? Only $9 million ($2 million of that is the county’s money) and you protect all the homes downstream.

You had better take a look at all of these used cars at high noon on a sunny day before you close the deal.

There are, according to NRCS, 397 properties that would be eligible for buyouts or floodproofing in the nonstructural alternative. The nonstructural alternative protects 276 of those 397 properties and spends approximately $51,000 per protected property (based on a 75% voluntary signup rate).

The dam protects 122 properties. How much per protected property? Well, if you use the market value, as NRCS did, it works out to be a really big chunk. But let’s throw the land in for free (like a set of mud flaps). That makes Dark Hollow Dam "cost" around $9 million (we will, for the time being, ignore the destruction of 45 acres of park, distruption of the ecology of the stream, and the periodic flooding of a couple hundred acres of land upstream of the dam). Dark Hollow Dam protects the properties for about $74,000 a pop. Makes it seem pretty clear that the dam doesn’t work–it protects fewer properties at higher cost. It fails in an absolute sense (protecting fewer properties) and a relative sense (the cost is higher than an alternative’s).

But like the 16 year old boy that was dreaming of the sports car ever since he was five, the dam backers insist that they were promised a dam. So their position becomes that floodproofing, buyouts and Dark Hollow Dam are ALL needed. These folks like these used cars so much they want the sports car and the station wagon. How much will that cost? And what does it get you?

If you have enough money to implement the "build both" alternative, you are spending $18 million (let’s say the land is still "free"). The nonstructural alternative, by itself, costs $14 million. That’s $4 million dollars (the dam actually costs $9 million to construct, but if the dam is built, less money ($8.8 million) needs to go into nonstructural measures). How many more properties will you protect for the additional $ 4 million?

The NRCS report says the "build both" alternative protects 309 properties–only 33 more than the nonstructural alternative alone (and the nonstructural components protect about 2/3 of the properties for about half of the cost; the dam, the other 1/3 of the properties for half the cost). And it costs another $4 million to get that level of protection ($14 million for the nonstructural vs. $18 million to "build both").

If you spent the $4 million on floodproofing and buyouts, instead of diverting dollars to an inefficient dam project, you could protect another 80 properties (@ $51,000/property). Eighty on top of the initial 276 would mean that you protect about 356 properties for $18 million, while building Dark Hollow along with extensive nonstructural alternatives costs the same--but protects only 309.

356 minus 309 is 47. That’s how many properties won’t be protected–forty-seven--if money is wasted on Dark Hollow Dam instead of spending the equivalent amount of money on floodproofing and buyouts.

It doesn’t take higher mathematics to go the next step. The NRCS estimates that 397 properties would be eligible for floodproofing or buyouts. At $51,000/property, that works out to about $20 million. Forget about Dark Hollow Dam, find another $2 million, and protect every property.

Or buy the sexy sports car tonight and regret it in the morning.

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