With respect to the proposed new marina, does any official of OPA, Inc. or the board have a detailed projection of the year by year total incremental life-cycle cash flows for this project and the associated underlying assumptions made for each cash flow line item in the projection?

For that matter, does any official of OPA, Inc. or the board have a detailed projection of the year by year total incremental life-cycle cash flows for each alternative in the comprehensive plan with the associated underlying assumptions made for each cash flow line item in these projections?

If yes, has anyone in OPA, Inc. (1) performed a due diligence review of these projections for reasonableness? and (2) performed any other cash flow analysis besides nominal payback?  (I agree with CALIBAN that nominal payback analysis has dramatic flaws as a decision making tool even if all incremental cash flows are included since it ignores the time value of money).

As OPA Inc. seems ready to embark on some serious capital spending over the next few years, does OPA have documented capital management procedures and policies approved and in place? 

Based on my limited exposure to OPA, Inc. financial accounting practices, I have never once seen or heard discussed by the staff or the board any budget versus actual comparisons for current capital projects. If I were a betting person, I would bet that OPA Inc. utilizes little, if any, modern capital management analytical tools (especially if they are relying on nominal payback analysis for justification of the marina expenses). Incidentally, most modern capital management analytical tools are readily available on Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet program. That's the easy part. The hard part of the analysis is gathering reasonable estimates of all the incremental, life cycle cash flows of the asset.

One of my preferred methods to analyze a capital project is to calculate the Discounted Benefit/Cost Ratio [divide its discounted, life-cycle cash inflows (benefits) by its discounted, life-cycle cash outflows (costs)]. If the ratio is one or more, the project has neutral or positive life time cash in flows and should proceed. If choosing among several alternatives for the same project, the alternative with the largest positive ratio is preferred. It is prudent to run any analysis using three different scenarios - worst case cash flows, best case cash flows, and most probable cash flows. If a positive ratio is not reached in the worst case or most probable scenarios, then sensitivity analysis (varying the variables) is needed to isolate the critical variables so that studies can be performed to mitigate these before proceeding with the project.