It is, however, relatively easy to describe the costs of bull trout recovery and the burden the species' protection places on communities, said Chris Nolin, chief of the Fish and Wildlife Service's Division of Conservation and Classification.
Nolin denied allegations by environmental leaders that the data was censored at the request of politicians and the timber industry.
That's why the economic analysis released by the government reported only the $300 million price tag of protecting bull trout and its habitat in the Columbia and Klamath river basins.
The full, unedited analysis showing $215 million in benefits was given to reporters earlier this week by the Missoula-based Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Friends of the Wild Swan.
They received the report from an anonymous agency employee.
"This is so blatantly dishonest," said Michael Garrity, executive director of the Wild Rockies group. "They simply chose to hide the benefits of bull trout recovery from the public. They misled the American public."
The censored chapter ran 55 pages and described hundreds of millions of dollars in potential benefits from the recovery of healthy bull trout populations, most related to the restoration of a sport fishery.
The economic analysis is important because it will have an effect on how much bull trout habitat is designated in Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon.
Under the Endangered Species Act, the federal government can exclude areas from a critical habitat designation "if the benefits of excluding them are greater than the benefits of including them" - unless the species would go extinct.
More than a year ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to designate 18,468 miles of streams and 537,722 acres of lakes and reservoirs in the Northwest as critical habitat for bull trout - which is protected as a threatened species.
Federal officials will use the economic analysis to pare down those miles and acres of habitat before releasing a final decision in September.
Nolin said the analysis was released without information on the potential benefits of bull trout recovery because the federal Office of Management and Budget "does not like to see benefits analyses" that rely on two specific economic methodologies used in the report.
Knowing those concerns, Fish and Wildlife officials removed the benefits analysis before giving it to OMB for review, Nolin said. "We were concerned that we wouldn't be able to get this cleared with OMB, so we removed it before they looked at it."
At issue were two methodologies: contingent valuation studies and benefits transfer.
Contingent valuation "looks to measure the value of things for which there is no market," Nolin explained. "I can't tell you the value of an endangered species because no one can buy or sell one."
So contingent valuation takes what Nolin called "a sideways view."
"You develop a survey and ask people how much they would pay to keep those species on the planet," she said. "And you use their answers to infer some particular value."
But people often list one number when asked the value of a species and quite another when asked to put up the actual money, according to Nolin.
And that makes contingent valuation an unreliable way to describe the value of a species, she said.
In benefits transfer, economists "take an analysis that was done for one species and one purpose and extrapolate from that to another species or purpose," Nolin said. "But OMB says this kind of analysis should only be used as a last resort. It just isn't reliable."
Nolin conceded, however, that both methodologies are commonly used to estimate economic benefits, and that there are no better, alternative approaches.
That's why the Fish and Wildlife Service decided to take a "qualitative" approach to considering the benefits of an at-risk species' conservation, she said.
The economic analysis is just one of the factors that Interior Secretary Gale Norton will consider when she decides how much "critical habitat" should be designated for bull trout, she added.
The final designation of critical habitat is not an economic decision, Nolin said. "It's a policy decision."
So the lack of economic data on the benefits of bull trout recovery is not critical, she said.
"We have never wanted it to be a simple cost-benefit test, because we don't think we have a very good way to measure the benefits," she said. "Trying to monetize these benefits when we don't have good tools just doesn't make sense."
The Endangered Species Act "says we can exclude areas from critical habitat for a bunch of reasons, including the economic impact on the public," Nolin said.
However, she added that "the benefits of this species to society and the benefits of any particular areas are not inconsequential things. We do consider them in our analysis."
At the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Garrity said his group simply does not believe the Fish and Wildlife Service's contention that economic benefits cannot be measured.
Other government agencies routinely measure and describe precisely such benefits.
The state of Montana, for example, described the historic benefits of healthy fish populations in its successful Natural Resource Damage lawsuit against Atlantic Richfield Co. in the upper Clark Fork River Basin.
The suit produced a $215 million settlement for the state.
More recently, a study published by the U.S. Forest Service placed the economic value of clean water produced by the national forests at $3.7 billion per year.
To ignore the value of the bull trout fishery invalidates the Fish and Wildlife Service's analysis, said Garrity, himself a former instructor of environmental economics at the University of Utah.
"They just took it out of this report because they didn't get the answer they wanted," he said. "It was politics. It was the timber industry. They didn't want this information out in the public."
Reporter Sherry Devlin can be reached at 523-5268 or at sdevlin@missoulian.com.
If you're interested
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will host a public meeting on its draft economic analysis of the potential cost of designating critical habitat for bull trout from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks office in Kalispell, 490 N. Meridian Road.
Agency officials will take public comment on the analysis through May 5. Written comments should be mailed to: John Young, Bull Trout Coordinator, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Ecological Services, 911 N.E. 11th Ave., Portland, Ore. 97232, or faxed to (503) 231-6243.
The cost-benefit analysis can be found on the Web at http://pacific.fws.gov/bulltrout/documents/_BTfinalDraftEconomicAnalysis_031804.pdf.
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