Private Water Utility Landholdings: Financial and Political Implications
Abstract
Ecosystem services research has led to policies favoring watershed land protection
at the federal, state, local, and private levels, notably at drinking water treatment
facilities. A few researchers have connected land use and water utilities by estimating
surface water treatment costs through raw water sediment load. However, more comprehensive
cost-benefit research of private watershed land ownership is absent. In my research,
I develop a distributional cash flow model to estimate the magnitude and timing of
costs and benefits to a Connecticut private water company, the local community, and
to the economy as a whole using Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority
data, interviews, regulatory landscape, tax regime, and non-market valuation benefits
transfer.
The base case model predicts positive NPV to all parties in Connecticut: $3,828,432,329
to the economy from 2010 through 2025, where $1,461,824,087 of that is from benefits
to the company and $2,366,608,242 is from benefits to the community. Sensitivity analysis
implies these findings may be robust to systematic changes (+/- 10% and +/-20%) to
input parameters. The distribution of costs and benefits lends itself to political
economy considerations and future policy reflections.
Type
Master's projectPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/8585Citation
Vigliotti, Tabitha (2014). Private Water Utility Landholdings: Financial and Political Implications. Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/8585.Collections
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