Assembly Standing Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review

Thank you. How are you? Good. Good morning and welcome to today's we've got a little weird echo in here. I think this might be is it what I think this is? Echoing the laptop. Okay, let's do a little tech admin to try to resolve that. Laptop. Perfect. Good morning and welcome to today's oversight hearing of the Assembly Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review. Before we jump into today's discussion, let me just dispense with a couple of administrative items.

First, to ensure that Members of the media and public have access to today's proceedings, this hearing will be streamed on the Assembly's website, and Members of the public are able to provide testimony in person here in room four four seven. To preserve the safety of everyone here and to ensure the public's access to the discussion, please follow the directions of our sergeants. If any Member of the public in the room would like to testify during public comment, I will ask you to approach the microphone at the appropriate time.

Second, I do want to acknowledge that the Assembly has experienced several disruptions to committee and floor proceedings in the last few years. We certainly want to ensure that all voices are heard. However, any conduct that disrupts, disturbs, or otherwise impedes the orderly conduct of today's hearing is prohibited.

Thank you for your cooperation. And lastly, before we begin, I do want to thank my team, Bernie Orosco and Jackie Kinney, for their hard work in pulling together this hearing, as well as our committee secretary, Dougo Chavez. Thank you so much. And our Republican consultant, of course, as well. Thank you. It's a team effort, and we really appreciate everyone's hard work.

So with that, let's go ahead and jump in. Just a couple of comments before we welcome our first panel. Today's hearing is titled Follow the Money transparency and Accountability in State Grant Programs.

I think we all recognize that California is at a pivotal moment of historic public investment to advance our state goals on California's most pressing challenges the climate crisis, green energy, affordable housing, infrastructure, broadband equity, and more. We're also in the midst of an unprecedented infusion of federal funds. We are still investing nearly $27 billion in federal COVID relief funds, and we expect $30 billion or more in coming years from the Federal Infrastructure Investment in Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

A significant amount of this funding has been authorized for state agency grant programs. And as the Legislature prepares to cast our final votes on this year's budget, we are reminded that robust transparency and accountability in all things is more important now than ever. And state grant programs actually require a special focus for a couple of reasons.

So, while there are clear requirements for state contracting programs, California has no central agency for grants, and there are no uniform statewide transparency and accountability requirements for grant programs. Many grants are awarded or contracted out by grantees to third party private entities, and we are immensely thankful for their partnership and their leadership as we advance our shared policy goals. But these third parties aren't subject to the California Public Records Act, nor to other accountability measures that apply to government agencies.

Thus, visibility into individual grant awards by state agencies, as well as subrecipients is really critical for policymakers and also for the public to be able to, as we said, follow the money. So, in other words, we need transparency to achieve our accountability objectives. And these objectives include to ensure prudent stewardship of public funds to track progress in achieving state policy goals and advancing equity to enable data driven decisions and timely program adjustments where needed to prevent loss of funds that are not spent by federal deadlines to align with new federal transparency requirements for grants and, of course, to prevent waste, fraud and abuse.

The bottom line is that we need uniform, timely actionable reporting on all state grants by all state agencies. And this hearing is really an opportunity for us to dive into what's working really well across our state agencies, where there's opportunities for improvement and what changes that we can make as policymakers to ensure that ultimately we have transparency and accountability for all. As we said, the billions and billions of dollars that are being invested right now. With that, let me turn it over to Vice Chair Dixon to make any opening remarks.

Thank you, Chair. And I want to thank everyone for coming today to this Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review Oversight Hearing. I want to thank the Chair for leading us this way and her leadership in identifying the importance of accountability and transparency and how every dollar, dime penny is spent.

So thank you. I know you've talked about that on a regular basis, and I applaud you for bringing this forward, since my data tells me that since July 1, 2020, California has 66 participating departments who have received total estimated funding of $49.9 billion. We have incredible programs taking part in the state grant funding opportunity.

So those who are establishing best practices, which I understand we're going to hear today, I think that serves as a potential model for other agencies. But the Chair has identified the fact that there are no standards, practice standards for grant making in the state of California. And I think that will go a long way in understanding how this can be further administered. And we can foster greater public trust by ensuring accountability and fairness in the allocation of state funds. So, without further ado, I applaud what you're doing and what the staff has done to bring us here. And thank you.

And thank you, Vice Chair Dixon, for your partnership and work in this area as well. With that, let's jump into our first panel. I want to welcome our first panel of witnesses.

We are joined by Helen Kerstein, the principal fiscal and policy analyst from the Legislative Analyst Office, who will provide an overview on accountability for state grant programs. Christine Ciccotti apologies if I butchered that name. The Deputy Director and Chief Counsel of Legal Services for the Department of General Services, who will discuss the distinction between grants and public contracts.

Mary Halterman, the assistant program budget Manager Federal Funds Cost Tracking and Accountability unit from the Department of Finance who will discuss state agency reporting to DOF on federal funds. And by Shivani Bose-Varela, the Grants Portal project manager from the California State Library who will describe the California Grants Portal welcome everyone, and we will hear prepared remarks from all of our speakers and then jump into questions at the end of the panel. With that, I believe we are beginning. Ms.. Kerstein with you. Thank you for being here.

Thank you so much. Good morning, Chair, and thank you so much for inviting me to participate in today's hearing. My name is Helen Kerstein with the Legislative Analyst Office. So to guide my remarks, I prepared a handout, which hopefully you should have in your packets. The handouts are also available on our office's website, and there should be some here in the hearing room for those who need it as well. In the interest of time, this is a rather lengthy handout.

There's a lot of information, some of it's just for your reference. I'm going to just kind of touch on the highlights because I know you have a very busy day and a busy hearing. A full agenda if you turn to page one. I'll start with just some high level background on state grants, really, to set the stage a little bit for the hearing. The state provides grants, a wide range of types of grants, and it distributes them in a lot of different ways. So one of the main ways is competitively.

So there are grant solicitations that the state provides, and folks compete for those dollars. But the state also sometimes provides funds on a first come, first serve basis, or in some cases there are specific projects that are outlined in statute. For example. Also note that there's some gray area about what constitutes a grant. The state provides a lot of money on a formula basis, for example, and some folks might consider those dollars to be grants, in some cases not. If you turn to page two, really, this kind of highlights the breadth of state grants.

The state provides grants to a whole host of entities. So local agencies receive quite a few grants from the state. That could be cities, counties or special districts, for example. But there are a lot of other entities that receive grants. As the Chair mentioned, it can be a variety of different entities, and then sometimes they can contract that out as well. So, for example, tribes sometimes receive funding, as do nonprofits or in some cases non governmental entities.

And really, grants span all of state government. So you think about the program area. There are probably grants that are going out. And that's one of the things that makes it a little bit hard to get your head around because there's such a breadth and fund really a wide range of types of activities. So a lot of state grants go to build capital infrastructure, but in some cases the state also supports operating costs with grants. If you turn to page three, we highlight some of the ways the state funds grants.

So the state sometimes pays for grants on a cash basis, on a pay as you go basis. The State also issues bonds in some cases to pay for grants and it uses a variety of Fund sources, in some cases the General Fund, the state's main operating account, in other cases a variety of different special funds. And I think particularly notable for this hearing, another main funding source, is the federal government.

So in some cases, the federal government passes through funds through the state, and the state actually administers those grant dollars. So that's why I think the remarks about the federal infrastructure dollars are particularly important because the state's playing a big role in administering those dollars. Of course, in some cases, the federal government also provides funding directly to those grantees as well.

If you turn to page four, there's a lot of information here. I'm going to try to summarize it pretty quickly, but basically comprehensive data on state grants has been lacking. It hasn't really been available. It is improving, and I think you'll hear later on on this panel a little bit more about one of the big efforts the states made this grants portal that the state library has. And that's I think a really important effort. But apart from that, I would say there's a lot of variation in the information available on state grants across state government.

For some programs there's pretty good information or relatively good information that's available in a readily accessible way on websites. In other cases, it's really hard to track down and sometimes it requires actually just asking departments for information because it's difficult to find on websites or maybe unavailable. And in many cases when it's reported, it's pretty basic.

So a lot of times the information provided, it might just be the grantee name and the amount that was provided. And while that's helpful, it doesn't really give you a sense of what was funded, what was achieved with those dollars. So in many cases, that's one of the challenges with the information available.

If you turn to page five again, there's quite a bit on this page. But really I think the highlight is that while the data, historical data on state grants isn't great, so it's hard to figure out exactly how much state grants have increased over time, I think there's a pretty clear indication that it's gone up quite a bit. And part of that is that the state General Fund has been very robust over the last few years.

There have been significant surpluses, particularly in 20-21 and 21-22, and that allowed the Legislature to make really significant one time investments. And many of those were made in the form of grant programs to local agencies and others. And then, of course, that along with this big infusion of funding from the federal government, which is really very unusual.

It's a very unusual time we live in where we've had this big increase in state dollars as well as the big increase in federal dollars. So I think it's really timely that this committee is looking at this issue now when we see all of this increase in funding, and really important, in many cases, new grant programs that the state's never funded before. And so we really need to sort of figure out what those are doing and making sure that those are effective.

If you turn to page six, we moved to a discussion of the transparency and accountability in state grants and want to highlight that transparency and accountability is important for a lot of different reasons. So I think most fundamentally, it helps folks understand where the dollars are going, right, follow the money. So I think that's a really critical, important part of transparency here.

But it does more than that. It can help the Legislature ensure that its goals are being met with these programs. And it can help all of us understand whether programs are operating the way they're supposed to, whether they're effective, whether they're efficient, whether they're being administered in a way that's equitable.

And I have just a couple of examples, I think, in that area. For example, if you don't know which communities got grant awards, it can be hard to tell, okay, was there sort of even geographic distribution across the state? If that's a goal of the Legislature, are disadvantaged communities benefiting from those dollars, or are they being excluded from those dollars? So those are important types of questions that you can really start to answer once you know where the dollars are going. But if you don't know where they're going, it's really hard to even start.

And I think similarly, in terms of effectiveness, if you have information on the outcomes, you can start to ask the question, okay, which programs are we getting the most from our dollars and invest more in those? And that can help the state use its limited resources in the most effective way. We also highlight a couple of key ways that we think the Legislature can facilitate transparency and accountability, both on the front end and on the back end. So on the front end, that's before the dollars go out.

And there are a lot of different things the Legislature can do there. Establishing clear goals and objectives for grant programs in statute, I think is really important, and making sure those grant programs are well coordinated and not duplicative. Providing statutory guidance on how programs are to be administered and how funds are supposed to go out, how grantees are supposed to be selected is also important.

And then setting up those accountability measures upfront, right. So knowing what has to be reported and how upfront is really important to make sure that that data is available. Also, another thing that can be helpful is establishing new grant programs on a limited term basis that provides a natural check in so the Legislature can see, okay, we did a three year pilot.

How is this program working? And it can be a really good way to then come back and make decisions about whether it's merited to continue on an ongoing basis. So if you turn to page seven, also highlight some back end accountability. So not just before the dollars go out, but after they've gone out, how do you ensure accountability and transparency as well? And a lot of that is really focused on reviewing that information, so not having it just sort of be on a shelf, but really making sure that it's reviewed.

That to the extent that there are specific programs that really merit it doing funding some research or supporting research to ensure programs are effective. Holding oversight hearings like this one, I think is a really important step to making sure that those programs are accountable and that the public understands again what they're getting for their dollars. And then following through, of course, on corrective actions.

So if there are issues that are identified through that whole process, making sure that there are steps taken to address those. So those back end accountability measures really rely on the front end stuff. If you don't have the reporting, it's hard to do an oversight hearing that's as effective, or it's hard to do the research if you don't have that basic information.

So I think that's why it's so critical to have that front end accountability to make sure that the state is well positioned to ensure that the dollars are being spent in the most effective way, especially given, really this huge infusion that we've seen. So that's the end of my prepared remarks for the purposes of today. Just given the interest of time, there are a few more pages as part of the handout.

Most of them cover some specific examples that might be of interest to the committee. You could review them at your leisure, and if you have questions, happy to take them. But given the limited amount of time, I want to defer also to the other folks on that panel.

Thank you, Ms. Kerstein. Yes. Appreciate those common sense recommendations, and we may dig into some of the detail when we jump into questions. So with that, let's turn to Deputy Director and Chief Counsel Christine Ciccotti.

Good morning, Madam Chair.

Please correct my pronunciation.

Sure. It's Christine Ciccotti. Thank you. Good morning.

Thank you. Christine

Sati, Deputy Director and Chief Counsel for the Office of Legal Services at the Department of General Services. And I'm joined here by Matt Bender, our Deputy Director for the Office of Legislative Affairs. Thank you for inviting DGS to come and testify before the committee this morning.

So, we were asked to really speak to four topics related to transparency and accountability on state grant programs. The first one I'll talk about is what DGS's role is with respect to state contracts and the, really, the public interest policy rationale behind having us serve in that role. So, DGS's role is to ensure state contracts comply with the public contract code, and the public contract code sort of lays out these General principles that we look at.

Those principles include we want to make sure the law is clear with respect to competitive bidding requirements. The law seeks to ensure full compliance with those requirements to protect the misuse of public funds. We want to make sure that all bidders are all qualified per bidders are provided a fair opportunity to bid, which stimulates competition.

The law seeks to eliminate favoritism, fraud, or corruption in the ward of public contracts. And then, certainly, the law looks to aid state officials in administering the system by creating a uniform system for state contracts. So each state agency is responsible for making sure that its contracts comply with those legal principles and are based on sound business practices.

It's important to note that there are different bodies of law governing the different types of state contracts, so we kind of put them in buckets. So there's a bucket for non-IT goods, there's a bucket for non-IT Services, there is a bucket for IT goods and services, and then, finally, public works contracts.

So, DGS's Office of Legal Services our role is really specific to the bucket of non It service contracts, and we provide the final approval of all agency non It service contracts as required by law. The reason DGS serves in that role is to ensure compliance with those principles that I laid out to really conserve the fiscal interests of the state and to really apply our contract knowledge and expertise to state contracts. The second topic I was asked to speak on was those specific, what is DGS is looking for, what is our approval based on, and what we believe is required when we're looking at those transactions, if a transaction is deemed a contract.

So, the General rule is that DGS is that all departments have authority to enter into non-IT service contracts that are over $50,000 or $150,000, depending on your authority. But they all require DGS OLS approval, and so the contracts are void unless approved by DGS Office of Legal Services unless there is a statutory exemption for those contracts. So the DGS Office of Legal Services publishes the state contracting manual.

That's really our principles and guidelines to guide departments. And chapter two of that manual is our General roadmap of what we look for when we're reviewing about 8000 non-IT service contracts a year. So we're looking for statutory compliance with what I laid out earlier, procedural compliance.

We're looking to assess the impacts on the state constitution civil service mandate when it comes to contracting out for services. We're looking to make sure opportunities for competition were provided for. And then finally, we're looking to make sure the contract includes standard terms and conditions that protect the state's best interests.

And then for goods and it contracts, DGS has a Procurement division, and each Department has a level of authority to purchase for those types of contracts, depending on what the procurement division has granted them based on their experience with that Department, as well as auditing that Department. The third topic is the transparency requirements that have already a little bit been spoken to for state contracts. So the General rule is contracts are public records.

Each state agency is the custodian of that official contract file, and they can produce that file in response to a PRA request. When we look at transparency from DGS's perspective, we look at transparency of opportunity. So the opportunities to bid on contracts are all publicly available on a centralized website, the Cal eProcure website.

So interested vendors who can go in and view all those opportunities to bid, as well as there's a legal requirement that we advertise all opportunities they are unless specifically exempted. And then finally, an additional measure of transparency is our Procurement Division maintains a centralized database that tracks key data points from the contracts departments enter into so the public can go in and see how each state agency is spending its dollars. The last topic I was asked to speak to is DGS's authority over state grants and how an agency determines if a transaction is a grant or a contract.

So, in practice, each Department makes a determination as to whether this is a grant or a contract. If it's a grant, it does not come to DGS, because legally, we only review state contracts, so we don't have that grant expertise, which is why I have all these wonderful people here. So the state contracting manual, that policy manual that we put out, chapter four, section 4.6, explains the difference between a grant and a contract.

And that guidance is based on Attorney General opinions, which just demonstrates what the distinctions are sort of at a high level. Grants must have specific statutory authority. Grants must not be for the benefit of the state, and performance under the grant must not be controlled by the state.

It really needs to be controlled by the grantee. It needs to be the grantee's program, not the state's program. Those conclude my prepared remarks and certainly happy to take questions at the appropriate time during the hearing. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks so much. All right. We will jump to Mary Halterman, the assistant program budget Manager of Federal Funds Cost Tracking and Accountability Unit from the Department of Finance.

Good morning, chair and Members of the committee. So. I'm Mary Halterman, Department of Finance. I am the Assistant Program Budget Manager for the Federal Funds Accountability and Cost Tracking Unit at the Department, also known as Fact, and my team oversees the tracking, implementation and oversight of various federal stimulus and disaster relief funds that were passed by Congress in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which includes $27 billion in State Fiscal Recovery Funds, also known as SFRF. That was under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2019. That's also known as ARPA.

So initially to provide transparency on the usage of over, now $639,000,000,000 allocated to California from the six federal COVID stimulus bills that came both to and through state departments as well as directly to local governments, businesses and households within the state. Finance has led statewide coordination efforts using our existing internal resources initially to track and report information publicly on our website on the use of these federal funds. However, given the size and scope of SFRF received under ARPA, the 21-22 Budget Act established the new unit, my team within Finance, to provide dedicated statewide reporting and tracking of federal stimulus funds.

So, to that end, fact, we work both with Finance's Office of State Audits and Evaluations, as well as our Fiscal Systems and Consulting Unit, to assist in overseeing and monitoring all of the SFRF implementation and compliance activities in relation to all the federal requirements. So, in recent years, Congress has also passed other significant legislation, which includes the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, and the Creating Helpful Incentives to produce Semiconductors in Science or the Chips Act of 2022. So we assist in coordinating and tracking federal funding opportunities under these various acts as well.

So, while we assist in all these other areas, our primary responsibility is reporting to the US. Treasury on the usage of the $27 billion of Sfrf funding. So these funds have been used to respond to the COVID public health emergency and its negative economic impacts.

It replaces lost revenue, and it also makes investments in water, sewer or broadband infrastructure. So, California has dedicated a majority of its funding to address copid's negative economic impacts and for revenue replacement, which mitigates the loss of essential government services associated with the Pandemic. So, the reporting requirements on these funds includes quarterly performance and expenditure reports, as well as annual recovery plan reports due to the US Treasury.

And to meet these federal reporting requirements, Finances Information Services Unit built us an SFRF portal for state departments to enter information on subrecipients awards expenditures as well as performance data on a quarterly basis. My team reviews the Department submissions for accuracy, which are then subsequently exported from our portal and then submitted to the US. Treasury through their federal portal. The quarterly updates on the status of awards and expenditures for each of the programs that are being funded by SFRF are posted to our public website shortly after we submit to US. Treasury.

Additionally, our annual recovery plan is posted on our public website at the same time that we submit it to US Treasury. So for these efforts finances, SFRF Portal has actually received the 2022 Best of California Award for the best application serving the public category from the Government Technologies California Digital Government Summit last year. So, while not a federal or state requirement, we also have a separate COVID-19 Federal Tracking Portal which is used to collect expenditure and obligation data from state entities for federal awards from the six different stimulus bills that is then made available on our public website.

So, while departments may continually update awards and obligations in the portal, due to the limited workload capacity of both departments and finance, ongoing departmental submissions are only required to be made biannually around the Governor's budget and budget enactment time frames. So after Department submits a finance, we review the submittals for accuracy and completeness and follow up with departments with any questions that we may have on information that they've submitted to us on various programs. And since the majority of the funding to California does not flow through a state Department, we are limited in the data we are able to collect and report on a comprehensive basis for the state as a whole on our public website.

So, based on our experiences with the COVID-19 Federal Tracking portal and given the complexity of federal funding, a comprehensive and detailed one stop site for all the state funding data, similar to what's done at the federal level with USAspending.gov would require a very significant amount of administrative resources, oversight time and funding. Real time data capability for federal award transparency is difficult as time is needed to confer with the departments and also inputting all of the data and conducting quality review before it's published publicly. So in our experience, this takes a significant amount of time.

So notably, the USAspending.gov site is extremely limited when it comes to delivering the actionable data as it's unable to roll up by subrecipient data to the prime recipient level, which is the entity that's actually received the federal award. So this is due to some issues such as the different geographic locations between the prime and subrecipients, as well as the places of the actual performance of the project where the project is actually being completed, as well as departmental data limitations, different award needs and different award requirements, missing or incomplete data, and no differentiation between different funding sources. If there's multiple funding streams coming into fund one project.

So these issues become more frequent as you get to the more granular levels of detail. So as you go from the prime down to the sub to any sub subcontractors, it gets harder to track all of this data and roll it up into something that's meaningful and actionable and easy to kind of look at at a global level. So, while working within these limitations of data availability and workload capacity, we still continue to provide.

As much valuable information on our website to promote transparency in showing how and where the federal COVID stimulus funding coming to California has been used. So just last week we updated our website with the most recent award, obligation and expenditure amounts for all of the programs under the six federal stimulus bills. And we have now also included the federal expenditure deadlines to show progress in fully expending all funds received prior to the federal cut off dates.

So additionally, in the two years since my team has been established, we've taken great strides in promoting transparency and accountability of the state's Sfrf funding. So we regularly post timely information on our website, including program awards and expenditures, our state recovery plans, training materials, references to continually updated federal guidance and statewide contacts for additional questions or resources requested from the public. Additionally, the Administration, through the Office of Data and Innovation is also in the process of developing several infrastructure dashboards, including ones for transportation and broadband, to track the progress of state infrastructure progress projects through metrics such as the number of projects, locations, schedules, milestones, and total funding amounts from both state and federal sources. So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thankyou so much. Yes, we'll jump into those when we hear from our remaining panelists. Next we are going to turn to Shivani Bose-Varela, the Grants Portal Project Manager from the California State Library. And let me just make a quick comment because we're going to get a little audiovisual presentation, so just a word on process. For the benefit of those in person in the hearing room and watching on live stream, Ms. Bose-Varela is going to demonstrate the California Grants Portal with a live navigation of the web pages.

This will appear on the live stream and then on the screen here. For those in the hearing room, the image on the screen isn't as big as we'd like, but we are going to make it work. And on the live stream it's very legible and certainly will be archived.

And for any Members in the room who would like to follow along, we do also have a handout of some screenshots available and with that thank you Ms. Bose-Varela, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Good morning, Madam Chair and Members of the committee. I am Shivani Bose-Varela with the California State Library. And with me here, I have the state librarian, Greg Lucas, to answer any questions you may have. My position really focuses on California Grants Portal, and today I'm going to share the history of how the State Library was asked to implement AB 2252 and demonstrate how grant seekers in the State of California can utilize this site to find eligible grant opportunities in one central place. I'm happy to answer any questions afterwards.

With that, I'm going to start with the background. The California Grants portal Grants CA Gov is managed and hosted by the California State Library. The Grant Information Act of 2018.

AB 2252 required the State Library to build a single website for grant seekers to find State of California grant opportunities by July 1, 2020. AB 132, section 83 34.1 expanded the Grants Portal's mission in 2021, requiring state grant makers to submit post award information for all grants closing on or after July 1, 2022. This website was built keeping in mind our users and based on the user centered design approach, which means in the beginning of the process, the State Library surveyed the grant making agencies to understand the universe of how many grant opportunities are offered in the state of California.

Once that was determined, we established point of contacts with each of the state agencies and there were one on one meetings with over 40 state agencies taken place before the pandemic, and during those meetings we understood their process of how grant making is done in their agency and Department. Alongside with that, the State Library also hosted focused meetings with over 100 state agency representatives to really understand the data elements that were being required by the legislation and if there were any challenges that would be coming up. As we implement this portal, we use this feedback to build initial wireframes, which were also sought out feedback on via survey and webinars.

We categorize all the feedback as we move with the wireframes, which is initially a design on the paper. We also build a prototype. We categorize that feedback as well, and before implementing, we asked all state agencies to provide feedback and also put in any data set that they could to test out the prototype.

We repeated this process again during our surveys and webinars for AB 132 implementation with the state agencies. Even though state agencies played a key role in our stakeholder group, we went through the same process with the grant seekers. We ultimately built a list of approximately 900 nonprofit representatives, public agencies, which included local government, cities, counties, representative, as well as special districts and businesses that were willing to give us feedback.

Through this process, we surveyed and held webinars with these groups to learn about their expectations and ideas for the site and kept them informed throughout the process, even till implementation in July 1, 2020. And again, the same discovery process was taken for AB 132 with the grant seekers as well. To receive their feedback and implement the functionality for post award data, it is important to remember that the information for each grant in the California Grants portal is inputted by the state agencies.

AB 2252 required the State Library to create the portal and required the state agencies submit grant award information to the State Library for inclusion in the portal. So far, we have received grant program information from 66 state agencies, over 1100 individual grant programs since July 1, 2020. As of this morning, the portal shows information for 182 active and forecasted grant opportunities that have been entered by state agencies.

To fully demonstrate the value of the portal, how grant applicants and the state agencies that award grants would take me more time than allotted. But to give you a good overview, I'm going to showcase how a grant applicant can search for a grant and submit an application for a grant and how they can post award date that starting with the homepage, an applicant can find an eligible grant opportunity by completing the sentence. They can select an applicant type, so they can select either they're a business, a nonprofit, individual, other legal entity which includes the trust public agency, again including local government, city, county, special districts, K to twelve and higher education, or a tribal government.

As they use this filter already pre populated by the portal, they can also select a grant category. The grant categories are there are 19 categories in a very high level which includes major policy areas and we determine this based on the discovery we've done with different portals around the nation and state, including grants, gov and how it was displayed for federal government requirements. So these categories are listed such as Disadvantaged community, underserved Communities.

These are tagged by the state agencies as they're entering the grant opportunity on the portal and they can select as multiple selections of the category. They can also select a time frame. So in other words, if an application deadline is approaching in a month or three months, six months or a year, this allows the grantee to be able to get a filtered result of a grant opportunity for those filters available on the home page.

And also the homepage also provides a visual representation of different types of categories and applicant type and also a recently posted Grant opportunities. It also provides us the virtual number of how many grants are currently active and forecasted. As I mentioned prior, 182 are currently open and there's 15.9 billion currently available and this number is updated every 24 hours as the state agencies are updating information on the grants portal.

So it is almost live in that context. Now I'm going to demonstrate an example of a grant opportunity. If I go to find grants on the top of the homepage, it takes me to an advanced filter page where an applicant can come and search for a grant opportunity through a search or they can select an agency if they're already aware of an agency.

They can also select categories, applicant types or disbursement method. In this case they can select reimbursement, advanced type of grant opportunities they might be looking for. They can also see loan and Opportunities or decide not to. In the keyword you can type in a title of a grant. In this case I'm going to demonstrate a grant by Coastal Commission Whaletail Grant sorry, apologize. It is a closed grant.

Therefore I need to select a closed filter to be able to see all closed grant opportunities. There's no retention on the portal, which means all closed grants are archived and viewable for any grantee or applicant that might want to look at the previous history of the grant opportunities. So in this case I'm going to select the Whaletail grant by Coastal Commission.

It provides you a high level information on the dashboard. As you probably saw earlier, it provides you enough information to be able to determine if this grant is something that you want to look into a little bit more, such as open date, state agency's name. If there is any match funding required estimated total funding that are being provided for this grant alongside with any estimated low and high range of information or dollar amount that will be given out and if it's a reimbursement or advance.

It will also show that in this high level dashboard when I click on the Whaletail grants it takes me to a detail page of the information which is where all state agencies are required to provide most of these data elements as I go through by the legislation. So for instance they are tagged by the categories as I mentioned earlier Disadvantaged Community, Education, and Environmental Water. It also provides a purpose which is a summary of what this grant is achieving.

So in this case the Whaletail grant helps people connect to the California coast and watershed through experimental, educational, stewardship and outdoor experiences. It provides with any expected award announcement date. So when should a grantee or an applicant should expect to hear from the state agency? It also provides a period of performance so how long the project can stay active.

Again it has all the information and state agencies are required to provide description which also provides with the requirements and exemptions any highlighted keywords that could be essential for applicant to be able to find this grant opportunity. It also provides any notes that the state agencies might have regarding funding source. Again all of the grant opportunities on here are regardless of funding source which means it includes state and federal funding.

As I go down to this page you can also see who is eligible for this grant. In this case individual, nonprofit, public agency and tribal government applicants are eligible to apply for this grant opportunities. Geographic requirements are also part of a requirement from the legislation so they are required to provide any type of exemptions or requirements that might have specific to geographic location of the applicant.

In order to apply for this grant opportunities, the applicants have to go to the department's website to read further RFA to then apply through the process that is determined by the state agency. We do not host the application just like grants gov does, but we don't and that is to ensure that the state agencies can continue having their process and portals to accept applications to go to the grant. Full detail of the grant opportunity an applicant will click on a grant guideline.

In this case it will take me to the coastal commission's website for whaletail grants, and they have all the guidelines listed here and how an applicant can apply for this specific grant application in word or PDF and so forth going back to the grants portal. There are also resources available by the state agencies, such as if they can sign up for notifications through that Department, or they can actually attend any workshops that might be available by the state agencies, such as technical assistance workshops or even public hearings if they are required to have those part of the legislation. One of the data element that is required by AB 2252 is the contact information.

State agencies are required to provide an email address and a phone number for any questions and inquiries regarding this specific grant opportunity. With that, I'm going to demonstrate two ways how an applicant or a grantee can come and look at post award data. So post award data, as we know, is really important information about the award, how many applications this grant received and how many awards were made and who the recipients were in order for a grantee to see that data.

One of the ways they can come to back to the homepage or actually find grants and they can select post award information again. We have a tooltip that really defines what post award data means. If a grantee is coming and they're new to the portal, once you select this checkbox here, it automatically defaults to active and closed grant opportunities, which means there are grant opportunities that are ongoing.

They do not have application deadline, so therefore those are considered active grant opportunities. We also have closed grants, which obviously already have been closed and no longer accepting applications. So once I hit apply filter, it will then filter and only show the grant opportunities that are related to.

And right now I have it on whaletail grants. Therefore it's only showing the whaletail grants as I select on the grant opportunity. If I scroll down to the bottom, this is where all the post award information is listed by the state agency for this specific grant. The fiscal year 22-23 data. Number of applications submitted were 149. Number of grants awarded were 56.

To demonstrate how to review the recipient data, I'm going to select the wilderness youth project again on the dashboard itself, it gives a high level information such as the project title, the type of project they might be enforcing with the funds, total award amount given to the recipient, also the beginning and end date of the project. So for example, for instance, wilderness youth project. The project is going to be a bridge to nature.

It was awarded $49,566. It started on March 17, 2023, and it ends on April 15, 2025. So let's say if I really want to understand if this award has subrecipients, that's something that was actually silent in the legislation, but we require the state agencies to provide the answer yes, and no.

If there are subrecipients, they will select yes. Therefore, they will be directed to contact the state agency for further information. If there were no subrecipients, obviously they will have no for this grant for specifically recipient type is nonprofit.

So this is a nonprofit that received $49,000 from Coastal Commission to then pursue a project that will basically give youth a primary experience in school and out of school nature based mentoring programs, visiting local places like tide pools, beaches and mesas for activities including journalism and sensory awareness games and so forth. We also require geographic location served, which is a county. In this case, Santa Barbara will be the county that will be using this fund, and the nonprofit is resided in the state.

Agencies are required to give geographic locations served either by county or it's a statewide initiative, or it's an out of state recipient who might be using funds to impact California with their research or anything else. So this is more detail on the actual post award data, but I want to show you and demonstrate another example of a post award data that does have recipient information as selected yes by the state agency.

And this grant is 2022 domestic violence mobile healthcare program RFP by Governor's Office of Emergency Services. Again, all of the information I demonstrated earlier with whaletail grants is on top by the state agency as the grant offered information as we call that, and the bottom is the post award grant information. So again, fiscal year 22-23 demonstrates a number of applications submitted for this grant were 17, number of grants awarded were 13.

And to give you a better sense of how an answer for a subrecipient will be provided by the state agency, I'm going to select the open door network recipient. Again, this recipient was a nonprofit. The project they are again serving is the domestic violence mobile healthcare services.

And as you can see, subrecipient is yes, which means they may hire a contract or other organization to disperse funds throughout the community that they're serving. However, like as mentioned before, the legislation was silent on asking that information. Therefore, we only asked a very small set of data to even collect if there are subrecipients or not.

And again, for more information, we do direct oral inquiries to the state agencies to provide that information as needed. This specific grant opportunity again is providing domestic violence victims and survivors and their children access to COVID-19 testing, vaccines and primary health care through weekly mobile healthcare visits. And it is serving in the Kern county.

So again, as you can see, it has a demonstration of the geographic location that it might be serving around in the community. The second way to actually look at this data is going to our statistics dashboard. So for transparency is important.

As this legislation was implemented, we built a statistics dashboard for grants offered as well as post award data. So if you go to about this site and statistics dashboard, it will display all of the data two ways. One, you can see it on our visual representation that I will demonstrate in a minute.

Also, a public can view and download an Excel spreadsheet of all the data collected since July 1, 2020 for grants offered and for this fiscal year 22-23 for post awardee information. So for post-award information, we have built this dashboard to demonstrate how that money is being dispersed throughout the state of California. The total amount right now grant funded is 3.6K.

And awarding departments, there are 33 awarding departments. You can also see the breakdown of the recipient type, nonprofit, public agency, individual, and this is statewide to note tribal government, businesses. If I were to wanting to look by county, I can select geographic region, county, out of state, or statewide.

In this case, I'm going to select county, select county, I can select multiple counties. And as you can see, the number is changing and it only displays the counties I have selected. And as you can see, all the counties selected here, nonprofits, 172 public agencies, 209 grants awarded, individuals 592, tribal government two and businesses seven and 26, awarding departments throughout those specific counties selected.

Again, there could be multiple counties selected at the same time. So this data does have multiple selections. So to note that as well as if you are looking for grants offered data, again, we have a dashboard that has been running since July 1, 2020 to present.

As of this morning, you can see there are 66 departments that have participated in entering the grant opportunities programs in beginning of offering. Total estimated funding amount is $50.1 billion and grants offered are one point one k and this is a breakdown of how many are forecasted, which means they're not open for applications at this moment, but they might be planning purposes only, active, open for applications and again, closed. They are closed for application and it breaks down the top ten funding departments as well.

Again, all of this data is viewable and downloadable by anyone of public as well as anyone who's interested in really digging in deeper about the data. And this data is updated 24 hours every day as the state agencies make any updates. With that, I would like to note that the grant opportunities are entered and managed by the state agencies administering the grant.

The opportunities are entered as they become available and or open for application. The State library has the Grant makers guide for the state agencies with instructions and definitions of each data element required by AB 2252 and AB 132 and provides any onboarding training as there's a turnover in the state agencies. Each state agency has an account on the grants portal to enter and manage their own grant opportunities.

We have permission based back logins for state agencies. We also have established point of contacts who actually continue to work with us through their Department as we may not be aware of their changes in their Department or divisions that might be providing grant funding. So, with that, those are my prepared remarks and a showcase, a demonstration of what the grants portal is and how it is useful. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thankyou so much. That really is a phenomenal resource for the public. And I think actually before I jump into my other questions, I would love to ask a question from our state Librarian.

So, thank you for joining us today, Mr. Lucas. So, in preparing for today's hearing, as I noted in my opening remarks, it became clear that there isn't really a centralized control agency for grant programs for the state of California. The California State Library has been assigned a pretty major role.

I guess that's not an obvious place for where you would imagine some of this information to be housed. Can you just give us a little bit of background in terms of how that came to pass?

Well, sure. Thank you. Madam Chair, Greg Lucas, State Library I don't think to your point that the state library was identified in Senator Limon's Bill as the place where this grants portal should reside. And how did it come to the state library? Well, I got a phone call, and so the phone call began with an explanation of stuff that everyone here already knows, which is that libraries are a source of information. They're open to everyone intuitively. I was told people who would be looking for the sort of information that's here on the grants portal would think first to go to the library.

Right. Because that's where you find what you're looking for. And at a certain point, it felt like they were kind of laying it on a little thick. And so I sort I skipped ahead and said, what is it you want us to do? And then they said, well, there's this grants portal. And I said, Fine, we're excited to do that. And so then they kept talking for a while.

You know what I mean? You can't take yes for an answer, right? It's like, okay, we're in. Like, we'll do it. And that's how we got the job.

And we certainly been lucky to have Shivani running the project. And it's become I would think Senator Lamone would agree that what it's become is more than what she anticipated in that initial legislation. And I forget, how long have we been getting the post granted?

Started July 1, 2022.

So just recently. And adding that dimension to it, I think, is really also terrific. I mean, of course, my concern would be that we're just making it easier for people to fall into the black hole of the state application process. That's not the subject you're hearing today.

Yes, that can be a follow up. That's a conversation for another day. Mr. Lucas. And what recommendations, if any, do you have or what additional support is needed for your expanding role related to state grant programs?

It's only as good as what's in input into the portal. And so, I don't know, you stop me when I'm close to the OB marker here, but over the years, it's been easier to work with some departments to have them add their grant opportunities than others. So I'm not sure how to fix that.

I mean, we've worked pretty hard to make it happen, and I don't think there's any outliers any more. Really good answer, but I don't know what that would look like. But to facilitate providing this information, particularly the post granting stuff, every state agency is busy doing what it is that they're supposed to do.

So how quickly do we receive that? Is there some mechanism we can create where it's easier for the different agencies to input the sort of information that makes it better for a potential grant applicant? I mean, those sorts of things. And I think the more we as state agencies talk to each other about that, I think probably some strategies would emerge that would just make it more convenient and effective at the same time.

Following up on that question. So are there any agencies that are not registering their information for inclusion in the California grants portal? You don't need to name them but just is everyone on there gratefully?

I don't really know the answer.

To that, I can take that on. So at this moment we're not aware of any. However occasionally we do receive inquiries or made aware of or stumble across that there are grant programs that are not entered into the portal. Therefore we work with the departments to ensure those grant opportunities do get inputted into the grants portal. Unfortunately it is on the state agency's discretion to provide that information to the portal as the budget funding is approved. We're not looking at the budget closely enough to determine what programs are being funded.

So therefore it really does is state agency's responsibility to ensure all grant opportunities that define under the legislation are entered in a timely manner.

Right, because you said it's at the discretion of the state agency, correct? Right. I mean it is in fact required by statute but you don't have the time or resources to be policing that right. Okay, but by and large it seems as if most agencies are engaged and participating.

That's correct.

Is this information? I think you said it's updated every 24 hours, but I think Mr. Lucas, to your point and certainly as useful as what's in there. So posting information about a grant that's expiring next month is certainly less useful than having that information up there at the start of the grant. I don't recall the specifics of the legislation. Are there requirements for the timeliness of uploading information for agencies?

Sofor AB 2252 which is the grant offered information, it is supposed to be at the same time it goes live on their website which means that once they have published their RFP or RFA or NOFA on their website, they are required to make sure that grants portal is updated for the post award information. However the legislation was a bit silent on the timeline however, as doing a discovery with the state agencies and having discussions regarding how their process works for really building the post award data. Again, I want to note before I mention the timeline that they are able to functionality and technology solution wise can enter data at any time they have final post award information available however to encompass all state agencies large and small and boards and commissions.

The discovery phase determined that it was feasible for state agencies to provide data from any time the application closes from there to twelve months. So in other words, they have up to twelve months to provide us with post award information because as we know, federally funded grant opportunities may not get awarded at the same time as state funded might get information a lot quicker for a recipient. So therefore, the system will start sending them notifications as a reminder at six months period after the application closes.

If they have an ongoing grant opportunity, they are required to provide every fiscal year. Because of the fact that it's an ongoing opportunity, they might be receiving applications that trickles. They may not have a data set available within a month or two or so forth.

So again, we are requiring them to provide final awardee information as this information is public and live immediately. Therefore, It's department's process that they have to go through the scoring mechanism and so forth to have that final information before they upload it onto the portal. But it is open for them to provide that as a functionality wise at any time as long as it's final.

Okay. And again, this is also not the topic of today's hearing, but I think what you have created is really a tremendous resource for the public in terms of navigating just the kind of myriad grant programs. I think you said there's 1100 or something that are on there.

There are other programs, I think that could also benefit from that same level of sort of consolidation and almost like one stop shop resource is the infrastructure and the It infrastructure that you built there something that could potentially be repurposed for another agency or department to do something similar for, say, small businesses, for example.

Absolutely. I think we have been in conversations with other departments. If they reach out and ask us about how the front end and back end was built for this portal, we're definitely open to having those conversations and sharing our lessons learned and how this was built.

Okay, great. Okay, now I would like to jump into a handful of questions around the post award reporting. We're trying to wrap our heads around what is actually being tracked and I'll start Department of Finance with you.

So you described the information that you are reporting on the federal side of things. I guess both for the federal side of things and for the state side of things. How much are we actually reporting metrics versus just reporting the dollars that went out?

Yeah. So when it comes to the six federal bills in General, we're not tracking any specific metrics at Department of Finance. So individual departments may be tracking some of that depending on what the requirements were for each of the programs. So information may be available on their sites as well as at the federal government sites.

When it comes specifically to the State's Fiscal Recovery Funds, we are required to report on treasury specified metrics depending on the project type, as well as identifying and developing our own outputs and outcome metrics that we also have to report to us treasury. So the outputs and outcomes, those we report on an annual basis and that's included in our recovery plan, which we have on our website and on a quarterly basis. That information isn't required to be reported to US Treasury. we don't have that information available on a quarterly basis. We just have the expenditures and awards each quarter.

Okay, and can you give us an example for the programs where you are reporting metrics? Can you just describe in a little bit more detail one of the programs and for example, what kinds of metrics are actually getting tracked and reported?

So one of the programs which is completed now is related to it was related to vaccine outreach. So the vax for the win, the lottery project, that was done in 2021, I believe, now, along with the $50 gift cards for getting your vaccine, as well as the second one, depending on what shots you got those projects. The outcome there was to try to decrease the decline and the decrease of vaccinations that people were receiving.

So there was a sharp decline in the number of people that were starting to receive vaccines. So this program was initiated to try to increase people getting vaccines. So we have a little graph that the California Department of Public Health put together showing the decline before that program was put in place, along with what the decline was after the program was put in place. So it did slow down the decrease in the number of people that were receiving vaccines. So it did help incentivize people to go get their shots.

Is that kind of goal tracking as part of reporting? Is that more the exception or is that more the rule?

Specifically, for this program? It is a requirement of the US. Treasury, so we are required to develop the metrics that we are going to measure against to determine kind of like the success of the project.

Okay, So for the bulk of the I don't know how many billions of dollars of funding that we have received for grants, have we been tracking results or have we been tracking dollars that went out only?

So, my team, we're just really focused on the state fiscal recovery funds. So for that $27 billion, we are also tracking the results. When it comes to all of the other programs, I can't speak to all of those. Those would be the individual departments that receive those awards that would have to provide that information.

Because I think one concern that I have and this has come out in other oversight hearings that we've conducted across kind of a range of agencies and programs. It seems like when we talk about reporting, a lot of the times we just talk about kind of keeping track of just where the money went, not what results the money had. And I think that the public would be surprised to know that, right? Like when we set up a program to build more affordable housing, I think that the expectation is that when we're implementing that multibillion dollar program, we're not just tracking how many hundreds of millions went to that group or that group or that group that we're rolling that up into.

And therefore we built X many affordable housing units, or if we're working on programs to end homelessness, that we are in fact tracking not just where those dollars went, but then the actual impact that they had. And as we've dug into this topic, it seems like sometimes our grant making is sort of so labyrinthian that we actually don't have the data to roll that up. I guess my question both well, before I jump into that, because on the state grant portal, what kind of information are you receiving from departments for post award tracking? Is it just money and where it's gone? Or are there results oriented metrics as part of that?

There's a mixture of both. So initially they're required to provide us with number of awards made, number of applications received, and then also providing individual recipients that would match with the number of awards and those recipient information requires recipient primary name. So in other words, if they're a nonprofit name or whoever primary recipient is that's receiving the funds, it also includes a project title.

It includes total award amount that the state agency awarded this recipient. It includes matching Fund, dollar amount. If the matching Fund was a required field initially, it also requires them to provide a project summary, which is where it will talk about how is this recipient going to spend the money and who are the beneficiaries of these funds, and then geographic location served, which again is within counties, statewide, or out of state. And then if they selected county, they got to give us who these counties are. But other than those data elements, we do not track the project level detail as it was not in the legislation for AB 132.

And that's consistent with my understanding. I just wanted to clarify that. So let me then pose a question, Ms. Kerstein, first to you and then to anyone else who would like to respond. Yes. You made a comment in your opening remarks that the dollars that we've been dispersing has perhaps outpaced the state's ability to both make those grant programs in a robust way but certainly to track and manage those programs in a robust way,

But to help ensure that we actually do have an effective metric for how each grant awarded is delivering on our state policy goal and the reason that we're making that historic investment. Do you have any big picture recommendations for the Legislature in terms of how do we ensure more robust tracking and kind of results oriented reporting moving forward? And are there specific examples of grant programs that actually do have really effective metrics for the grants?

Yeah, thank you so much for that question. I think part of the challenge is, as was mentioned, there isn't really a requirement now that across the board outcome information be reported. And so it's inconsistent, right? For some programs, there may be legislation that does require that reporting, or maybe in some cases departments do it on their own, but in other cases, there's just really no information available.

And also what is the outcome metric? In some cases, it's probably easier to sort of pin down and evaluate than in others. So I think kind of maybe a really good example of where it's maybe a little bit easier is if your goal is connecting people to broadband, right, you should be able to pretty easily say, okay, well, how many households were connected? There are other ones. If it's a housing type of program, if your goal is how many folks were stably housed from this program, you could probably hopefully measure that.

Whether we do always perfectly, I don't know. Some of the other things are a little bit harder, right? We have all these wildfire programs, wildfire resilience programs, a lot of those, really, the aim is to protect communities and people from the effects of damaging wildfires and to probably beyond that, there are other goals as well. It's pretty hard to do that, right, to figure out what's the metric of protecting.

It's really important. Like, did this, did this field break actually protect the community? But that's a little bit harder to evaluate. But sort of at a minimum, you would think we should at least be able to get acres treated.

I mean, that's probably like at least a baseline. Maybe that's not the most perfect thing because we all I think there's wide recognition that not all acres treated are the same, and that's not the total goal, but that's probably at least sort of like a baseline of information that we would want to have even that's been somewhat challenging to get. And so I think that sort of shows that there are these challenges.

But I think it's one of those issues where I think if the Legislature wants that type of information, it's probably something that it'll have to consider as it's looking at establishing these new programs or considering whether it's worth putting requirements in for that kind of reporting. Because while there are costs, I think as was recognized to collecting, administering this data, there also are benefits. And so I think the Legislature will have to evaluate, are those benefits sufficient in terms of transparency, in terms of accountability, to be worth making sure that departments provide a higher level of information and really in a more timely way too? Because I think that's another issue that has come up here.

And I think sometimes one of the challenges is that if information is slow to be provided, or again, if it's sort of in a way that maybe it's a description, we're going to plant trees. But if you don't know, okay, well, how many trees did you actually plant? Are we planning to plant? How many did you actually plant? And then what was the goal you were trying to achieve with those trees? Were you trying to reduce the heat island effect. Did that work? So those are the things they're sometimes hard.

I think there are real questions about maybe for some programs the state wants more robust. Maybe there's a baseline that the Legislature wants for all programs, and then maybe there are some specific programs and maybe that's some baseline of account of outcome data. But then maybe for some specific programs that are of particular interest to the Legislature, or maybe getting a lot more money, maybe those ones you won't even go beyond that.

Or maybe some that are really hard that the outcome measure of number of trees planted isn't enough to really determine whether it was effective. Maybe for those ones, it's worth thinking about. Okay, is it worth putting some money towards sort of even getting the extra level? So I know that's a lot of different thoughts.

Hopefully that was helpful. And again, in the handout, we provide some examples of some of the ones I think are probably stronger or weaker or have some more strengths or more weaknesses. There's one BSCC Board of State and Community Corrections, one that I think is a particularly strong one, that's one where the Legislature has actually spent some money funding a third party evaluator.

So it's not just there's strong information on reporting that was required up front. It was set up as a pilot. And then there was also money that was put in to really evaluate the program. So that's probably sort of a gold standard. But again, that took some resources. So that might not be feasible for all of them.

But there are a variety of other examples here that we highlight that are pretty strong too, or that have some significant strengths. So if you have any questions about them, happy to try to field them, although they're not all within my area of expertise, so some of them I may know more about than others.

Thank you. And I think I'll follow up offline with some follow up questions. I know we've got to jump to our second panel shortly, but I just want to before we do that follow up, sorry. Ms.. Halterman, do you have any thoughts or reactions or any comments that you would add on the question around outcome driven reporting?

So kind of along with what Ms. Kerstein was saying, it really depends on each of the departments. So there are some really good examples out there on departments that have very helpful and user friendly dashboards where you can easily and quickly see how the funds were spent and where they were spent and who benefited from it.

One of those examples is actually in housing. So the Department of Housing and Community Development, they do have dashboards for some of their programs showing exactly where the money was spent within the state, like number of units that were built, the individuals that were served. Another Department, the California Housing Financing Agency, they also have a nice dashboard on it was the mortgage Assistance program.

So they have lots of information and data showing the individuals that were assisted through that program and lots of metrics. There another really good one which is on the next panel is CalTrans. They have information on all the projects within the state from all the different funding sources coming in, both at the state level as well as from the federal level.

And you can kind of drill down to your home city, your location, and see what transportation projects are going on there. So it really varies across the state departments as to what information they are providing to show kind of how their programs are benefiting individuals within California.

Well, thank you both for highlighting some of the best practices and some of the agencies that are doing what I think we all need to be doing. And I certainly believe that we need to have a uniform requirement for outcome based reporting. And I think that we have to be able to translate the 30,000 foot vision and high level ambition into a plan that then has trackable and definable metrics for success.

And I just made a note. There's a quote from the Little Prince that's to the effect of a goal without a plan is just a wish. And yes, just writing big checks and hoping that we're going to get big results is not going to be successful.

And so really do appreciate all of the departments that are working to push for that outcome based reporting and want to make sure that we get to a place where the gold standard is the uniform standard. So we'll continue continue those conversations. So thank you all for being here and sharing your insight and perspective and for all the work that you're doing. We appreciate it. We appreciate you. Okay with that. I was getting the note. We got to move to our second panel. Okay.

Very good. Thank you. So, first mic check. Can you hear me okay? Sorry. It used to being virtual, so I have to make sure I'm not on mute here. All right, so good morning, Chair and Members of the committee.

My name is Angel Pyle and I have the privilege of being Caltrans's Senate Bill 1 Program Manager. I'm here joined today by Mr. Tom O'Hair, who is the Rebuilding California Program Manager. We're here today to walk through the real excuse me.

We're here today to walk through the Rebuilding California website and share our experience and getting to the site to where it is today. I think we have about ten minutes, so we're going to run through this pretty quickly. Could we please go to the next slide? So we've designed RebuildingCA website so the website, by the way, is Rebuildingca.CA.Gov.

So I just refer to it as RebuildingCA, and I'll refer to it that way throughout this presentation. We've designed the Rebuilding California website to be one that's a one stop shop regarding any Senate Bill 1 information, and the new federal infrastructure Bill, also known as the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act, or IIGA, as it's already been mentioned here. We've included a number of features on the site to communicate key information regarding these programs, including the very popular project map, which we'll dig into in a couple of moments, program information, Project Spotlights and Galleries dashboards, and so on.

Next slide, please. Senate Bill 1 provided significant investment in transportation and was codified as the Road Repair and Accountability Act of 2017. Caltrans takes this investment very seriously and is dedicated to remaining accountable and demonstrating that these funds are being used efficiently and effectively. We prioritize our commitment to transportation I'm sorry, to transparency, accountability, and the responsible utilization of public funds. Part of how we demonstrate that commitment is through Rebuilding California.

We promote program transparency and accountability, accurate data reporting. We foster public trust and confidence, and engage taxpayers using very straightforward explanations. While there isn't codified language driving what we have on the Rebuilding California website, the legislative intent is clearly to demonstrate accountability in these investments.

There's codified language requiring project reporting for specific programs, and that's available on Caltrans's website. What is on Rebuilding CA is intended to be easy to consume for the public and other transportation professionals alike. I should also mention the Rebuilding California site has evolved significantly over time, especially in the last couple of years.

This evolution continues and we've got plans to make the site even better in the future. Next slide, please. Before I go too much further, I should say Senate Bill 1 created and augmented over a dozen programs.

The IIJA even furthered these investments in transportation and have created or augmented even a number of more programs. Each of these programs vary and can be quite complex in what they're setting out to achieve. What we tried to do on the map and the site generally is to provide information in a very straightforward way.

And this does require significant effort. We have around 11,000 project records on the map right now, and it is the most popular feature on the site. Here we have a look on the project map on the left side of this screen, and then we have a look at the table view on the right.

Both sections can be filtered by various criteria, whether it's by program or by location, county, various districts, those types of things. And we're going to dig into this a little bit further. One thing I should point out, the table view on the right, a feature that we constantly get positive feedback about, is that you can export it and download it, and then you can do whatever analysis might be relevant for what your purpose is.

Next slide, please. All right, so here we're going to take a deeper dive into the map. You can see some of the features, the filtering features that we have in play here.

So on the top right hand part, we have the project type or the program, and then we also have filtered by location. So in this particular demonstration, we've filtered by Orange County. And then the program that we've selected is our SHOPP program, which is our State Highway Operations and Protection Program.

So that's where we do most of the major rehabilitation of the roadway. So here you can see the particular project that has popped up based on our search. So I should say after you select these project types and these other criteria, the map will then adjust based on your selected criteria, and it will pop up with little icons or buttons, if you will, that highlight where the project is.

You can either select that button to have this pop up, or there's other ways that you can select it on the site as well. So this particular project here, you can see the cost and a description. You can see other features available too.

A couple of things here to point out that this particular project is doing pavement rehabilitation and maintenance on our drainage systems, upgrading lighting, enhancing the highway road worker safety, replacing overhead sign panels, and other maintenance, including bicycle and pedestrian improvements. Something here I'd like to draw your attention to is the project status. So that's let's see it's.

The third item down underneath the description. This is a status on any project that's on the website. So they can be one of three different things. It's either planned, in progress or completed. So we tried to make this really super easy to interpret. This particular project here is planned, which means it's in a pre-construction phase.

So that could be design or right of way or something of that nature or even environmental. This project will begin construction in 25 26, which is where you can see the fiscal year information there. Next slide please. This particular view here is a closer look at the table view. It has the same information that we discussed on the previous slide with that project pop up. But I'd like to expand here on how frequently data is updated.

So on the right hand side of the screen, on the most right hand column, you can see the date that this was updated. So this was updated June 28 of 2022. This is probably the longest period that that would go without being updated. And I can tell you with insider information that we're working on updating this particular program right now, and that should be posted within the next week or two. Sometimes updates occur as frequently as quarterly. Other programs are updated annually.

It's very program specific on whatever is most relevant for that particular program. One thing that you can see that we've demonstrated here is that it's not a one size fits all approach and we try to update it based on what the program is. Next slide please.

So we're going to talk about a couple of site features on the website. It's always said that a picture is worth 1000 words and that's part of what we try to show and demonstrate on the website as well. So a couple of highlights that we have is that we do have a project gallery which provides a series of before and after pictures and also some video highlights of projects.

This is definitely an area that we're going to be expanding in the future. But here you can see this particular project made some significant enhancements to the roadway here. Next slide please. And here's another example of some of a pedestrian bridge improvement where we also have bicyclists actively using the trail and other features as well. Next slide please. A couple of other things to highlight on the site.

We do have a number of dashboards on the website. We're only going to highlight a couple of them here for the sake of time. This particular excerpt is from a dashboard available on Rebuilding California. This talks about how many jobs were created specifically based on the particular investments that are showcased on the website. So in this instance here, you can see that between both the SB 1 and IIJA investments, well over 250,000 jobs have been created. Next slide please.

Another dashboard that we have on the website is how well we're doing with our small business goals. We continue committed to that and we're happy to report that we have increased small business participate participation over 95% since our baseline year, which was in 2017. Next slide, please.

This particular dashboard shows that we've had over a total of $20 billion in IIJA funding announced to California. This is a combination of both formula programs as well as competitive grant programs. You can see on the right hand side we've got the bureau or agency affiliated with that particular grant, whether it was the Federal Transit Administration or federal highways, and so on and so forth. Next slide, please. We also have a dashboard that displays progress towards the goals contained in SB 1. These particular goals are for our main infrastructure assets.

These goals represent a collaboration between the Legislature and the Department and that were codified through SB 1. This dashboard shows progress towards these goals and are outlined from a number of different perspectives to demonstrate impacts from those investments. So we have highlights for pavement, bridges, culverts, and also TMS elements, which are traffic management system elements, and so we have various metrics available on those on the website for folks to unpack as they would like.

Next slide, please. So we reviewed some of the features on Rebuilding CA, and now we'll cover some of how we arrived at where we are today. One of the things that I mentioned at the beginning is that we are evolving and that evolution still continues.

We've come a long way in a few years, and it's taken a considerable amount of effort to get the website to where it is today. We also continue to evolve and incorporate more features that will both improve the user's interaction with the sites, but tell stories in a more proactive way, which demonstrates how we're improving the lives of Californians every day. A few things that we're looking forward towards in the future are modernizing the map, including a more robust project gallery, increased multimedia content such as videos and that type of thing, and also interactive dashboards.

So we're not stopping where we are now. We're going to continue to keep going. Next slide, please. We're going to share a few lessons learned on this particular slide on our arrival here, where we are today. And then we'll close out with accountability and transparency, as well as some recommendations for other departments to implement this type of thing as we move forward. So we have lessons learned in six key areas here.

First is communication. So we always want to make sure that the overall messaging of the map is one that communicates that we're investing taxpayers dollars efficiently and effectively. This messaging takes some effort to refine, and we're working on that every day.

In support of that, we also want to make sure we're telling the story in plain language. This goes for articles, press releases, program information, and information that we display on the map. A lot of these projects can be very complex and very technical, so we do our best to translate that so that we're speaking in very plain language.

This does take dedicated time and support from our teams, our program folks, It, and a multitude of other disciplines to make all of this come together in the way that you see it. Another item to mention is data synchronization. And by that I don't mean some sort of like super background techie term.

It's really like, how do we get all of these different programs to speak the same way, and how can we provide that information in a way that's really easy to consume? Let's see here. We take all of the program specific data from a large number of programs and we tell it all that same way. This requires a lot of business decisions and a fair investment of time.

Program complexity is also something that's important to consider. There's rarely a one size fits all approach, and the larger the number of programs and the number of projects in those programs will add to that complexity as well. Where we see this is that when it takes more time to gather the data, for example, all of that data that we put on the map all goes through a human.

It all goes through several humans even. And so it takes time to review that data and assimilate it in one message that can be easily consumed by the public. While I mentioned it previously, I will reiterate that we have over 11,000 project records on the map.

My last lesson learned here to that effect is user interaction and technology. We've tried to present data in a way that's easily interpreted, yet not overwhelming all at the same time. It also conveys the magnitude of what is happening throughout the state because there is a lot going on statewide through all of these programs and these investments. We highly recommend GIS element. Nearly 20% of our daily visits to the website is to the project map, and our visits to the site have increased over 60% since the last year. Next slide, please.

So, in terms of accountability and transparency, I won't spend too long here, but I'd like to go over some of the accountability and transparency requirements associated with SB One. First, it's very apparent in the intent that the intent of SB One is to remain accountable in how all of the funds are spent, and we stay true to that today. As far as statutory references, some of this is program specific and captured in the Accountability and Transparency Guidelines, which were established by the California Transportation Commission.

Those guidelines apply to a few programs funded by SB 1 and outline specific reporting requirements at various stages, so upfront accountability in progress, and then also post project completion and even somewhat beyond, as most have been recently incorporated. Some of the reporting based on these requirements is very detailed and can be difficult, maybe for somebody that's not a transportation professional to interpret. It can be found on Caltrans's website and the report will be included on Rebuilding CA in October of this year.

I should note here that Caltrans is responsible for the Administration and oversight of almost all of the programs in one way or another, whether it's oversighting guidelines or more very project specific oversight and Administration. Something I haven't mentioned that allows us to do that and I haven't mentioned previously, and it's not on the website, but it's an important element of how we oversight projects is something called Calsmart. So it's the last bullet here in that orange box.

Calsmart is a project reporting database that the Department created. And we have thousands of projects which report into this system on a regular basis at various intervals depending on the program requirements. And it's some of the information that's contained in Calsmart that allows us to post information on the map as frequently as what we do.

So that's part of why I wanted to mention that here. Last couple of items here on this particular slide is that each program has varying accountability measures. However, all of it's subject to audit. And of course, we use any of those audit findings to improve our processes as we move forward. Next slide, please. So here we'll close out on a few recommendations.

This is more for other departments or anybody else that might be trying to do what we've done here with rebuilding CA. And as always, we're happy to help and share any of that experience with anyone. And there's so many best practices here being outlined as well.

So in terms of recommendations for success, a few things that folks may already be aware of is we do recommend a program manager be responsible for not only the individual programs that are created, because it is very important to be accountable for all of those project or program specific outputs and outcomes in those projects. But we also recommend an overall program manager in the Department that kind of brings all of these things together for Caltrans. I have the privilege of being the Senate Bill One program manager.

Been in this position for about three years now, and it's the best job in Caltrans, I still say. So I have a fantastic team that includes Tom here to my right, and we collaborate with a number of other areas in the Department, bringing together all of the SB 1 funded programs into one area to tell one story. We're also happy to start bringing in the IIJA investments.

Our second recommendation is to be mindful and strategic about creating accountability and reporting requirements. When multiple programs are created with varying reporting, it can take time to track all of those and to bring all of those together as one. Yet we also have to be mindful that still a one size fits all doesn't work.

We have varying programs that projects might be smaller, but there's a larger number of them. And then we have these really tremendous, very large projects. So we have to be mindful of all of those accountability measures and make sure that they fit what we're trying to accomplish.

It does take a team of multiple disciplines to bring all of these things together from it to support data gathering, also expertise to translate everything that we're receiving. There's a lot of very technical, talented people that are carrying these things out. And so we have to be able to translate that to make it really consumable and very real for folks that are visiting the website looking for, hey, what's been done with these investments? We also need experts to help us tell the stories of the lives that we're changing and the web support to develop an engaging canvas where we can tell that story. Next slide. So this is our last slide. And in closing, we hope this overview has been valuable to you.

We've taken a lot of time and effort on this, and we're certainly happy with where we are and even where we're going to be going. So this is also most definitely an iceberg, and we've only touched the surface. So there's so much left there to unpack. And we aren't done with our journey. But if any of our lessons can help further anybody else, we're more than happy to share. So, with that, thank you so much for your time.

Super appreciate it. Well, and thank you so much. I do have some questions that we'll jump into after we hear from our next speaker. I just want to say thank you for what I think is really tremendous work. So it's a very helpful overview. And I think that the system that you've built is so usable and so useful, I think, both for policymakers and also for the public, because sometimes when we talk about reporting and accountability, it ends up in three years, we need to report to the Legislature.

And it's like this document like this that no one actually reads, let alone gets insight from, or can take action on. And so I think you've done a tremendous job translating the really large scale objectives of SB 1 and crystallizing that into a really usable site that is a tremendous resource and I think a really tremendous example. So thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

All right and with that, we will turn to Amanda Martin, who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Administration and Finance for the California Natural Resources Agency. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

Thank you for having me. Get real close to the mic here. We're really excited to be part of this conversation. I think we bring a real unique perspective because we do have so many entities under our umbrella. Since 2000, California has invested over $30 billion in General obligation bonds in the large natural resources area, equating to over 17,000 projects, many of which are funded through grants.

Of the 27 entities under the Natural Resources Agency, at least 21 have at least one grant program, and many have more or dozens of grant programs with so many under our umbrella. One of our best practices has been to convene a quarterly meeting of all of those grant program managers together to share best practices. They might have an issue and say has anyone else dealt with this and talk through how they've resolved a particular issue.

We do those quarterly with our agency and also even some folks outside our agency who use General resources or General obligation bonds in the natural resources area. And Props 68, for example, when it passed in 2018, these meetings were actually monthly because we were trying to make sure we were being consistent, that we were looking at both the interpretation of the statute and the processes on gathering information and sharing these expenditures publicly. So we do have the bond accountability website and for us that's bondaccountability resources CA gov and there you could go to Prop 68 and you can click on it and see all of the pots of funding under the Bond by chapter.

You click on one of those chapters, you see the programs under it. Under the programs you see the individual projects, pots of funding programs and the organization individual projects funded by that program. And then you can click on the projects and see project description, who implemented it, is it complete funding, other funding sources that might have come to that project? So we have that for all of our bonds back to actually Prop 84 that passed in 2006 and we have some information even before that, but it's not quite as detailed.

One of the other really key best practices I think for us has been community engagement on the projects. And that engagement starts even before an opportunity is listed on the library's website because it comes about in the development of our grant guidelines. The grant guidelines really are the parameters for applicants not only for what the opportunity is focused on and what they want to achieve, but what kind of reporting and documentation grantees might be expected if they're awarded the grant.

And so we do regularly conduct workshops on the guidelines even before they're finalized, kind of like regulations, except we get feedback, public comment, we may revise them before they're finalized, but we do those up and down the state. If it's a statewide program or within a specific region, if it's region specific, they can be conducted in person and virtually and it provides the opportunity for the public to ask questions, comment but it's also some technical assistance of kind of what to expect. And I would say with the addition of hybrid and the virtual meetings that's really expanded our potential audiences and outreach, we are also increasingly building in requirements either as part of the process or as part of the actual award for community engagement.

Not everyone's excited to have the state come into their backyard or next door and do a project, even something like turning a vacant lot into a pocket park right where you have greenery, and it helps with heat island effects and water runoff conservation. If the community surrounding that area is not engaged, that can be approached with skepticism, and it doesn't make the investment as valuable as it could be to the community that is being impacted. And so one of the areas, I think for improvement is language access.

We really make sure that if it's going to be in an area where the majority of the population doesn't speak English, that we include that language access in that outreach and in the development of the design of the project. Unfortunately, not all of our entities have enough funding to do language access in all aspects, but we are striving to increase in this area. And some folks have gotten really creative.

For example, when the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy switched to a hybrid meeting, they now do English to Spanish translation over zoom to make sure that folks can understand what is happening at their meeting. And that's where they award their grants. That's where they talk about the projects that are coming forward.

I'd also highlight the Strategic Growth Council's 2020 document technical assistance guidelines for state agencies. If we're going to meet the demands of the climate challenges that we have and we're going to move farther and faster, we need to develop the capacity of smaller nonprofit entities to navigate our processes and to make sure that they are able to help us as the state, as locals, as small business owners whomever to meet the challenges of today. And we conduct workshops before our program guidelines are finalized.

Afterwards, we do workshops with applicants where they can ask questions even before submitting their applications once the guidelines are final. So this is another one on one opportunity to make sure that we get the best projects and that people are, in fact able to sort of navigate the labyrinth that is our state.

When it comes to announcing awards in terms of public knowing what's going on with their dollars and who's getting the funding. That can really vary across our departments. So, for example, DWR Small Community Drought Award. They issued a press release. They posted on their website all the award recipients. They had a website with interactive maps of where the projects are located and project descriptions.

Likewise, Cal Fire has a list of awarded grants for each of their web page, on their web pages dating back to the beginning of the grant calmapper. It's interactive. They provide information on grant projects and a breakdown over the last two fiscal years of all projects included on the map and what method of treatment perhaps it was used, whether it was prescribed Fire or chipping.

On the other hand, smaller entities that accept grants on maybe a continuous or a rolling basis might not have a big press announcement award. But the Santa Monica. Not Santa Monica. Sorry. The San Gabriel lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, RMC. It's a board that I sit on.

They have in every single board agenda a cumulative report of grant projects that include name, applicant description, project status, right? So that's there every time publicly open meeting, it's on their website and they also have a separate item just on their budget. How much did they get in local assistance grants to give out? How much have they spent down so that everyone knows kind of the progress that they're making that year. So anytime you want to know what is going on with RMC, you can look on their website and kind of get the sense of what they've done with the dollars that the Legislature has given them.

And this is where I think they have to be really careful and realize the consequences of mandating uniformity and best practices because six out of ten of our conservancies have less than seven people on staff for the entire Department. So when you have only seven people, their ability to do like a GIS map, they're just not going to have that skill set, but they can report on the what you want to know, who got the money, where it's going. That's all included.

The how might be, where they're resource constrained in terms of how they present that information. So it's just something to think about operationally as we go down this road. So I've talked a little bit about our best practices in terms of coordinating with each other, outreach workshops, putting things on board agendas versus the website, all of which conveying information DWR, which I noticed was in the top ten on the library's graph of folks.

So I'm happy about that, but this is going to lead me to my last area of the grant cycle where we're both making progress, but I think we also have are facing challenges and that's the post project Completion Monitoring and Evaluation. So at the Resources Agency, we have a small but mighty unit that started in 2018 called the Monitoring and Stewardship Unit and they were established to guide the creation of a centralized monitoring and evaluation system for CNRA and its entities. Now, quite simply, each of our grant administrators overseeing a grant program individually at all of those departments are ensuring that we're getting what we paid for in terms of a grant agreement, right? When we award a grant, we go through that entire process.

We're making sure that we are getting the project through to completion. And we have regular auditing. Since a lot of our programs were bond funded, they require regular auditing and over the past 20 years that's borne that out. But how do we track and access the effectiveness of what these resources related investments are achieving? In some cases it's easy, right. If you pay to remove a dam so that the river can flow, the dam is not going to magically appear overnight. Right.

You know that you got what you were hoping. In terms of restoring water to the river. Likewise, I think the LAO mentioned a fuel break, right? If we do a shaded fuel break and subsequently a fire comes through and we're monitoring how quickly it moves and we see that it was able to slow down and the firefighters can get around it, we can infer that a fuel break was successful.

But what if we fund a trail? How do we know that a mudslide didn't wash it out or that the blackberry bushes didn't get overgrown? If we're not monitoring after the project is actually completed, we want to make sure that we really got the bang for the buck that we invested these bond dollars in. And so that's the challenge that the MSU team is tackling. First, the team developed the Resources Agency Project Tracking and Reporting system, which we lovingly call RAPTAR.

And this is sort of a centralized data management and reporting system that's designed not only for grant and project management, but has a place for that post project completion monitoring information. Now, this system, I'll be very clear, is still being refined, but we do believe that aggregating this data will allow for some of the sort of cross comparisons to occur and give us an opportunity to see if we are in fact achieving our broad stewardship goals when we can compare across our entities. Currently, we only have ten departments on it, each with at least one program, and we've learned a lot.

But there is definitely more to do. The next step is going to be to develop some consistent methodologies and metrics so that we can have those common points of comparison. And you were getting to this with the prior panel, but in the natural resources world, that can in fact be quite a challenge. I want to give one example. You have two projects. They're both interested in restoring habitat for riparian habitat, and they're both wetlands projects.

But one project, their goal is habitat for wintering and migratory birds, and the other is an example of farmland that's being converted back to maybe natural or native plants and vegetation and taking out some toxins and redoing the water quality. They're both wetlands, they're both habitat related riparian habitat. But one, the metric is going to be how many birds do we count, how many eggs are laid in the area, what's the wildlife capacity? And the other might be what's the water quality, what's the soil health? So we have these like, projects, but we can't actually compare across because their goals were slightly different.

So what does this have to do with the questions you all are asking about reporting on grants? I just provide this as a real world analogy to consider that when we're trying to report uniformly across projects, one size may not fit all. And I think that's a theme you've kind of heard from folks up here. We need to keep the purposes in mind.

The Leo talked about baselines and we absolutely want to look for those common threads. What can we report on that carries across like, projects and make this information available and then balance it with our resources? Whether it's a Cal fire or a state conservancy, make sure that we can achieve that. It's going to take thought, careful deliberation, but I think as a state we are up to it and I'm really happy that you invited us here today to engage in that conversation.

Thank you. Well, thank you for your comments and for highlighting some of the best practices across the resources agency. I know we're sort of getting to the end of our time, but I do want to just address a couple of questions and the first is, I think, for both of our agencies.

Can you just briefly speak to your experience reporting to the earlier panel heard from the State library about the California Grants portal as well as about quarterly reporting for federal funds? Can you just speak briefly to your experience for reporting to both the California Grants portal and the Department of Finance? Sure.

Would you like to go first or. I'm

okay, go ahead.

Okay, so in terms of the California Grants portal, we actively have four grants on there at this point in time. The feedback from the Department or from folks in the Department is that it was really easy to post the grant. The experience was very smooth. It appeared to be well thought out. The drop down menus made it very easy to select the appropriate criteria. There was enough, but it wasn't overwhelming.

So overall it's been a very positive experience in terms of reporting to Department of Finance. So we collaborate with Finance extremely closely. We work with them all the time.

Our experience with reporting with the federal grants specifically to them has been somewhat limited, but we still collaborate. If there's any questions at all, we're happy to answer anything. And we do collaborate with Finance on any specific questions that they may have specific to this, but then of course, more broadly on a normal basis, yeah.

I would say the State Library has been a really great partner. They came to our collaboration meetings even before the portal was developed and took some of what we had been doing and incorporated. They provided trainings. They're always open to suggestions for ways that the portal could be improved. And I appreciate there are like three different ways that departments can enter data. They can manually go in and key it in.

They can do a spreadsheet upload or I believe they also have like a file transfer type protocol. So they've really made it easy, I think overall to be able to do that. When it comes to reporting on federal funding, most of our departments don't get the kind of federal pass through funding that Caltrans would or others might.

For Water and Fire, for example, if Department of Water resources is building a levee with the Army Corps of Engineers. That money never actually comes into the state. We bring our people, they bring our people side by side. The levee gets built. Same with wildfire treatment, right? We treat the area on our state, they're treating the area on their state. We have MOUs, but the funding isn't actually flowing in. So we don't have a lot of that kind of reporting necessarily needed.

Got it. And then just a follow up question, Ms. Martin, for you.

You outlined some of the best practices for various programs and conservancies that are under the purview of the Resources Agency. Two questions. So, first, were those required by statute or are those kind of initiated by the agency or the individual Department? And second, how do you go about kind of identifying best practices and then pollinating them across the Department?

Well, I'll say I think the quarterly meetings were born out of necessity just to be able to do that. The reporting on the Bond Accountability accountability website and reporting on bond information is somewhat set in statute.

There is a requirement that for bond funded projects that they are displayed on our website with certain statuses. Other best practice requirements are things like whenever we Fund a project and SB One knows this. Whenever you Fund a project, we make sure we have a sign or something that lets the public know, hey, this was funded by this bond that you passed, whether it's Prop 68, One E, SB One, et cetera.

And so I think in terms of requirements, sometimes the Legislature says, you will do this, and then it's left to the agencies to kind of figure out how. I think that's one of the differences with our guidelines for our grant programs.

We want you to do X, Y, or Z, and the guidelines just take it down another level to refine. Okay, this is how we're going to achieve that. And those are public and they do get refreshed with new sort of best information, maybe different emphasis.

One example would be GGRF, right? Ten years ago, that wasn't an area of focus. Perhaps now it's actually baked into some of the bonds to be sure. We're capturing what our carbon footprint is. So I think it's a combination of just what's needed to get the job done, as well as guidance that could be come from statute or the Administration. And I forgot the second part of your question, but that's okay.

How do you go about identifying and then cross pollinating when those best practices?

Again, agency wide coordination meetings. We also have, like the monitoring and stewardship has put together some best practices that they've just shared. Hey, we have a distribution list here's, some information.

Whenever an issue comes up, we do like to just within our own network, try and share it broadly so that folks are aware, hey, if this issue comes up, this is the Department that has experience on that issue. Thank you.

And then just one last question for Caltrans. As I commented, the portal that you've put together I think is really impressive and so useful. How was that developed? Did you all do that in house with the Department of Technology? How did that come to be?

Sure, so it was developed internally initially, so there was a small group of people that all had wide reach in the Department. So it was developed internally at first and the primary purpose was and still is to communicate to folks that taxpayer funds are being used both efficiently and effectively. It's continued that way to this day where predominantly it's internal.

All of the content is developed internally. And then we do employ a consultant who polishes and then puts it on the website and we continue to work on look and feel, an organization with them. The GIS map is maintained internally, but we are looking to our consultant to upgrade that to what current standards would be because we do have some work to do on that to make sure that it remains functional and up to date as we all experience personally.

Even we have to make sure our phones are updated all the time. So it's the same thing with the map. So we're going to be looking to the consultant to do some back end maintenance on that and bring the map up to current standards.

Thank you. Well, thank you both again, all three of you, for joining us today and for highlighting some of the work that you're doing to ensure access to outcome driven measures and sure that we have robust transparency and accountability for grant programs under your purview. I appreciate it.

Thank you. and with that, we'll go ahead and turn to public comment. So at this time, we'll invite anyone in the hearing room who would like to make a public comment about the topic of today's hearing. You may go ahead and approach the microphone at this time.

Good morning, Madam Chair, Members of the committee. Keanu Valentine with the Politico group. Just wanted to take a moment to thank you for holding this really important informational hearing.

We work with a number of clients that are interested in advancing transparency and accountability and all government spending. We worked very closely with Caltrans and others on the SB 1 implementation map. And as I think you've seen today, it is a phenomenal resource that we think serves as a best practice for other grant programs going forward. So just thank you very much for the hearing and look forward to working with you and your staff on these issues.

Well, thank you. Thank you for your advocacy and partnership to advance our shared goals. Much appreciated.

With that, that concludes the business of today's hearing. We've learned a lot about what California already has underway with reporting on state grant programs and new ideas to explore to further enhance transparency. I guess I would just say sort of in closing two things.

As we noted at the start of the hearing, and I think throughout the panels, we're at a moment of unprecedented investment, both state and federal dollars. And these historic investments really offer California an opportunity to tackle some of our toughest and most seemingly intractable challenges, whether that's confronting the climate crisis, addressing our affordable housing goals, ending homelessness, ensuring that we have universal access to broadband. But as I might have said in the hearing itself, writing the check is always the easy part.

And there is a lot of work for us to do as policymakers, alongside our partners across state agencies and departments, to ensure that those historic investments are delivering historic results for the people of California. And so that is certainly my focus, my team's focus, and the focus of this committee. And look forward to continuing to work with all of our panelists today and with everyone else who's focused on this issue to ensure robust transparency and accountability for state grant programs.