Bonneville Power Administration Fish & Wildlife Program Management Platform

Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) manages the nation’s largest source of clean power: the federal dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Part of BPA’s mission is to protect fish and wildlife impacted by the hydropower system—its Fish & Wildlife Program is the largest environmental program of its kind in the world.

Why does this project matter?

To help BPA track costs, collect and analyze data, and manage hundreds of project actions for this vast program, the ESA Technology Services group designed a custom system for the Columbia Basin Fish & Wildlife Program called cbfish.org. This new platform fundamentally changed the way the Fish and Wildlife Program manages its finances, records its decisions, and tracks its projects.

What is ESA doing to help?

The cbfish.org system provides robust support for grant/contract management, detailed activity tracking, organization and contact management, and multiple levels of cost tracking, including invoicing. It also provides environmental compliance workflows for external contractors and internal compliance officers, while supporting reporting against NEPA, Endangered Species Act, CWA, and NHPA regulatory requirements. The public-facing website additionally helps BPA meet their goals for transparency and information sharing.

The scale of the cbfish.org platform is sweeping. This project required integrating decades of data records from BPA’s centralized financial and contracting systems. It also called for managing a huge amount of data: over 100,000 discrete activities or tasks each with its own estimated budget and reported cost, 370,000 milestone records, 310,000 metric records, 140,000 discrete GIS locations, and 30,000 status reports. Today, this platform is used by hundreds of federal staff and external partners to collaborate on the design of projects and efficiently execute thousands of contracts while tracking billions of dollars of program spending.

“The region should feel real ownership in what we are doing for fish and wildlife. This platform gives anyone the tools to see exactly what we’re accomplishing at any level of detail. We’re not just saying we’re doing good things for fish, we’re saying ‘come and see for yourself what we’ve done.’”