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Environmental Agency Seeks Information on Updating Reporting System

The California Environmental Protection Agency seeks information from IT vendors on how to modernize a reporting system that was stood up 11 years ago and is nearing end-of-life.

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The state environmental agency wants to hear from vendors about potentially replacing a linchpin IT system.

In a Request for Information issued Wednesday, the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) seeks input from vendors to replace a reporting system in place more than a decade, which is nearing end-of-life. Responses are due by 4 p.m. June 9. Among the takeaways:

• The California Environmental Reporting System (CERS), stood up in 2009, is “nearing the end of its useful life” and “must be updated to provide stable service to stakeholders,” CalEPA said in the RFI. Generally, Compliance, Monitoring & Enforcement (CME) information gets submitted to CERS as well as reports from businesses and Certified Unified Program Agencies (CUPAs), according to CalEPA; after review, the agency may report externally to state and federal partners, the public and emergency responders. The system also helps document businesses’ hazardous-materials inventories.

Summary inspection, violation, and enforcement information gets uploaded to CERS via “on-screen data entry or through electronic data transfer” from local CUPA systems; violations and enforcement actions can either come from inspections or “other reasons due to non-compliance.” Businesses, the agency said, are responsible for “returning to compliance (RTC)” and taking care of violations. “The RTC workflow will be a part of the CERS NextGen solution,” the RFI said.

• Businesses use CERS to turn in documentation of compliance or “Submittal Elements” to local CUPAs. CUPAs use CERS to review and accept those submissions, either in CERS or by exporting its data to local systems. CUPAs also input inspection, violation and enforcement information into CERS or send it via electronic data transfer; and they use CERS information for permitting, assessing fees and doing inspections. State regulatory agencies use CERS data to evaluate CUPAs’ administrative abilities. The data is merged with other information for display on CalEPA’s portal and is sent to federal agencies.

• Agency metrics provided to inform cost estimates show that CERS had 144,000 registered users as of April, and 14,300 average users per month from January 2019-March 2020. The system had eight system administrators and “internal staff with elevated privileges” as of April. Also as of April, CERS storage requirements including backups were roughly 3 terabytes for database and 5 terabytes for file storage.

• CalEPA seeks information from vendors on their ability to meet the project requirements and provide “rough order of magnitude (ROM) cost estimates,” it said. “This request is being conducted as part of CalEPA’s business process review and market research.” Ultimately, the agency hopes “to identify potential alternative solutions that can provide comprehensive and scalable functionality to modernize.”

Theo Douglas is Assistant Managing Editor of Industry Insider — California.