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wildlife refuges. The same common property attributes that made 
it necessary 68 protect public parks against preferential use 
in highway routing, apply equally strongly to the ocean. In both 
cases, but for at least marginally stronger Federal protection, 
highway developers would always choose to go put roads through 
parks rather than residential or commercial neighborhoods, and 
waste disposers would always prefer to dump wastes in the ocean 
rather than in somebody's proverbial "backyard." As the courts 
have recognized, from the Supreme Court on down, in construing 
the "prudent and feasible" alternative concept, while cost 
considerations certainly deserved a prominent place in the 
analysis, the public interest in parks (or in this case, in the 
ocean) was to be regarded as paramount. An engineering feasible 
alternative could, therefore, not be lightly dismissed simply 
on the basis that other alternatives were more expensive. On 
the other hand, developers were not expected to incur 
"extraordinary" cost increments as the price of safeguarding 
parkland resources. See, e.g., Citizens to Preserve Overton Park, 
Inc. v. Volpe, 401 U.S. 402 (1971). 
The draft bill, similarly, makes clear that an alternative 
is to be regarded as "prudent and feasible" only if it is 
available at "reasonable cost and energy expenditures" which, 
however, need not be "competitive with the costs of ocean dumping." 
(§4(2), p.- 9). This approach is little different from that 
currently embodied in EPA's ocean dumping regulations (§227.16(b)). 
These regulations specify that alternatives to ocean dumping must 
