Background

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EPA’s Brownfields program provides grants and technical assistance to communities, states, tribes, and other stakeholders, giving them the resources they need to prevent, assess, safely clean up, and sustainably reuse brownfields. Cleaning up and reinvesting in these properties protects the environment, reduces blight, and takes development pressures off greenspaces, thus reducing urban sprawl.

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Assessment 

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EPA’s Brownfields program is administered by a large, multifaceted database called the Brownfields Management System (or BMS), created and staffed by contractors. When the next firm to win the BMS administration contract could no longer meet payroll, Smith assessed the risks to his EPA client. Smith discovered that the members of the BMS staff, as well as the database they expertly ran were facing a total collapse. There was no contingency plan for transfer of BMS data and the highly trained, relatively senior staff of lawyers, policy analysts, and IT experts were already looking for other non-BMS jobs. The disbanding of such difficult to replace BMS specialists, the disruption of the BMS data entry, report generating, and analysis cycle, as well as the potential loss of data and servers had the potential to bring EPA’s burgeoning showcase Brownfields program to a temporary but catastrophic halt.

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Solving

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Smith saved EPA’s Brownfields Management System (BMS) database and 10-member staff by proactively planning the negotiated transfer of the BMS database and staff from a bankrupt and closing consulting firm to two other capable consulting firms.

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Smith, who was a senior member of the BMS staff saw early signs of financial distress at the firm before payroll was impacted. So Smith paid attention, carefully weighing his duties to the firm to help it survive as well as his duties to meet the needs of his EPA client if the firm suddenly went out of business.

 

Smith came up with a plan and made discrete contacts with the principals of other qualified firms without disclosing inappropriate details or being disloyal to his financially failing employer.

 

Implementation

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As soon as Smith learned that a month of payroll was missing, he put his plan into action. Within minutes of the announcement that payroll could not be met, Smith was at EPA headquarters briefing his client, the Brownfields Office Director, with a plan to save BMS. With her consent, he re-contacted the qualified firms where he had made contacts who could help him avert a staff/data loss disaster.

 

Within a week, Smith had successfully helped negotiate the transfer of BMS back to the original contractor that created BMS, the Morasco Newton Group (MNG). MNG agreed to take the database and the entire staff back from the closing bankrupt firm. Further, MNG agreed to transfer half the BMS staff to a second collaborative team that went with Smith to his new employer, DynCorp (now CS Gov).

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NAICS Codes 541620