As contracting for implementation of the UCHRP has become more involved and complex, it has proven to be more challenging to understand the budgeting for Project staff wages and Project On Call Services subcontracts.  Those major budget categories have been fragmented into multiple contract actions, making it hard to track how these key project components were being managed. This new contract will now house staff costs and on-call service subcontract costs.  In addition, all property will be reported under this contract as well, to simplify that aspect of project management.  This contract will be for two years, and will provide an easier way to manage these two components.  No other types of work and non-staff wages wages will be added to this contract.

The program-wide perspective of the on-call work elements is that they allow us to more efficiently produce redundant yet critical site assessment, design, and post construction maintenance activities across our work region, dramatically increasing the efficiency with which we can produce actual individual restoration projects that yield habitat mitigation credits under the FCRPS BiOP.  Topographic surveys, large wood haul, groundwater testing, native plant revegetation planning, producing river safety assessments, and providing maintenance of vegetation and habitat structures on completed project sites are all restoration related activities that must be completed on all or most restoration project sites, yet these project elements are not the core restoration project elements that actually produce mitigation credits to the Action Agencies.  Given the large number of projects we are currently investing in, if the program were to break apart these redundant project support activities as separate work elements for each restoration project site, these Accord contracts would be infinitely more complex and overloaded with redundant WEs and a confusion of related milestones and milestone dates, making it very hard to produce and review CRs and CCRs.  Also, this would likely require us to request more CCRs more often as these critical yet redundant work elements become needed on individual projects at differing times in the project development and completion process.  Additionally, our own Tribal contracting process would be overrun and dramatically slowed down by a need to constantly produce and modify subcontracts for redundant services with the same contractors on different work sites.  These effects would greatly impede our ability to produce as many restoration projects within the current time frame of the Accords as we can produce using this on-call method.