More than half the Floridians were willing to pay more in 

 taxes and utility bills to help clean up pollution .... 

 Floridians expressed higher interest in environmental issues 

 today than they did five years ago although the intensity of 

 this interest has declined due to a rise in inflation and 

 energy issues .... most Floridians prefer to forego economic 

 growth if it threatened environmental quality. 



Most of those queried said that they would pay 0.3% to 0.5% of their 

 annual family income to fight pollution. 



Another Florida-specific study examined the relationship between changes 

 in property value as a function of air pollution (Milliman and Sipe 1979). 

 The theory suggests that the perceived changes in air pollution would lead to 

 capitalizing that perception into the value of the land, and that high prop- 

 erty values are associated with high quality air. The general conclusions by 

 Milliman and Sipe (1979) after examining the Tampa Bay area and using cross 

 sectional analysis were as follows: 



Florida has good air quality compared to other regions in the 

 United States. With low levels of pollutants observed, we 

 should not expect to see significant damages and the detec- 

 tion of damages is more difficult. In general, benefits of 

 air quality improvements that can be measured with existing 

 secondary data are very small or nonexistent. We do not say 

 that benefits are low. We do say that we have not been able 

 to measure them given existing data and a low-budget 

 approach. Moreover, benefits that can be measured appear to 

 be elusive in the sense that they are quite sensitive to 

 alternative (but reasonable) specifications of independent 

 variables in estimating equations. The property value method 

 of estimating benefits of air quality improvements was 

 applied to Tampa data with weak and mixed results. 



An estimate of morbidity costs versus costs of abatement equipment and 

 the relative costs for each income class within a census tract was made by 

 Loehman and Berg (1979). The survey employed the median values as representa- 

 tive of the samples drawn and then developed an aggregate and distributed cost 

 and morbidity benefit analysis for the entire urban area surveyed. Their 

 statement was as follows: 



Under this scenario the total population is 1,541,700 

 persons. Morbidity benefits are $14,686,375, and abatement 

 costs are $7,560,181. The total morbidity benefits outweight 

 the total abatement costs on a two-to-one basis. However, 

 distributionally, in group 3 (Polk, Pascal, and Plant), 

 abatement costs outweight morbidity benefits. However, 

 redistribution of abatement costs could even out this distri- 

 butional inequity. The decision for a control policy thus 

 requires an applicable judgement as to who should bear costs 

 and who should receive benefits. One possibility to gain 

 acceptance of all groups would be to give group 3 a small 

 share of abatement costs and group 1 a larger share (by about 

 $2,000,000). 



259 



