Fish & wildlife Program FY 2001 Work Plan

Proposed interim project renewal process for FY 2001

January 26, 2000

To: Fish and Wildlife Committee
From: Doug Marker, Senior Policy Coordinator, Bonneville Power Administration

Subject: Proposed Interim Project Renewal Process for FY 2001

Next Monday I will present to you a proposal for a process to establish FY 2001 budgets for ongoing projects. This would be an interim process while the Council determines how provincial reviews should be conducted and how the Council should solicit new projects. I will ask the Fish and Wildlife Committee to endorse this interim process so that we can complete the renewal form and distribute it to sponsors of ongoing projects.

Need for an Interim Renewal Process:

The Council is still determining how to conduct a long term, multi-year project approval process. There are several reasons to initiate an interim renewal process now:

• Bonneville needs agreed-to budgets for ongoing projects. Without an agreed-to budget, Bonneville project managers will have to negotiate renewals unilaterally. Existing estimates for FY 2001 project costs are not sufficiently detailed to guide contracts.
• Project sponsors are uncertain about how their projects will be defined for renewal while the Council develops the provincial review process.
• The Council has asked for improved project contracting practices to achieve greater fiscal accountability in project funding. These practices require additional budget estimate detail to implement.
• The lead time for even an abbreviated budget process is significant. Our review of the steps to gather budget estimates and conduct decision-making tells us that we should distribute renewal forms to project sponsors by March 1.

The renewal process would be for existing projects only and would focus on improved budget detail. It would not collect the full level of project background and narrative used in previous years and would not go through the Independent Scientific Review Panel. Reasoning that this is a process to set budgets for already approved projects, scientific review would be left to the provincial review process. The process would be similar to those of previous years in that an electronic form would be used to collect budget estimates and the budgets would be reviewed and recommended by the Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Authority.

The sequence of the process and target dates is below:
 

Distribute renewal form March 1

Sponsors develop budgets May 1

CBFWA review and draft budget July 15

Council decision on final budget September 15

The major change in the budget format is to respond to Council guidance to improve fiscal accountability and implement Bonneville's improved program management practices. Specifically, the project budgets would be developed for separate phases:

• Planning and design
• Construction/Implementation
• Operation and Maintenance
• Monitoring and Evaluation

The Council requested that Bonneville begin managing project budgets more closely by these phases. The Council's FY 2000 decision document calls for doing so to provide improved capacity to monitor implementation costs and warn of unanticipated increases in project costs. Bonneville is conducting a redesign of its fish and wildlife management systems to improve project implementation and oversight (the major part of my assignment to Bonneville). This effort calls for clearer definition of project scopes and schedules. The level of budget detail in the proposed budget form supports these objectives and allows carrying the detail through the contracting and reporting process.

Outcomes for FY 2001

By endorsing this modified process for the interim, the Fish and Wildlife Committee can give Bonneville a means to renew ongoing projects with clearly defined budgets and objectives, even while the region transitions to a provincial review process. The proposed process supports improved project management practices and can serve as the fiscal core of future project solicitation and review processes.

Remaining questions:

The Fish and Wildlife Committee's endorsement will allow Bonneville to initiate completion of the renewal form and initiate a process that will go through CBFWA and the Council to determine a start-of-year FY 2001 project budget. Some details remain to be resolved:

• Out-year budgets: The form would ask for summary estimates of out-year project costs by phase. This is more detail than we have from last year's process, but is still insufficient for renewal in FY 2002 or 2003. Pending determination of the provincial renewal process, staff would settle for this level of detail and anticipate collecting more defined budget estimates again next year. Alternatively, the Council could determine that this is enough detail for the interim and defer to Bonneville to determine out-year budgets for the projects that have not received provincial review.
• Coordination with the provincial review process: The Council anticipates initiating project reviews in at least two provinces this year The staff goal with this renewal process is to define the core of budget estimation that can be added to by the desired scientific and policy detail for the provincial reviews. The caution is that time is running short to develop agreed-to budgets for project renewals beginning October 1.
• Soliciting innovative projects: The Council may initiate a solicitation of "innovative" proposals. This process would not do that, but should not conflict with a later innovative solicitation. The Council would need to define a placeholder budget for such projects before asking CBFWA to make an initial budget recommendation. That can happen between now and May.
• Projects in the "three step" review and criteria for defining ongoing work. The question would be how to define what is ongoing work to be renewed by this process and what is expanded or new work. Drawing such distinctions is an important purpose for this interim process. First, we would define projects already in the three-step review process for artificial production projects as ongoing work. They could proceed depending on the approval in the three-step process. Second, the renewal form asks for explanations of differences in requested budgets from the FY 2001 budget forecasted in last years? forms. That should help us identify significant changes in project scope.
• Provision for emergency funding of new needs. In reviewing this proposal, one question asked was how this process would provide for emergency needs. There is an existing process for such cases which would continue. That is the Quarterly Review process where such needs are identified and referred to CBFWA and the Council for reallocations from unallocated funds.

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