Natural Resources Budget Formulation

Developing Project Proposals

Annually a call for proposals is submitted to regions outlining the types and levels of funding anticipated to be available during the following fiscal year. The call includes all programs and fund sources. For natural resource fund sources, the call for proposals solicits a specific number of proposals or dollar amount of proposals from each region, based on an assessment of the relative natural resource management workload among regions. Most natural resource project fund sources are competitive; in these cases, panels use articulated criteria (see Exhibit 1) to recommend projects from among regions' submissions. Each region uses its own procedures to select projects to submit for servicewide funding.

In addition to meeting specific eligibility requirements for each fund source, project proposals must result from resource management planning as reflected in an up-to-date, approved plan, and must also be in PMIS.

To successfully seek project funding, a program manager must develop a request that is well justified. A good justification should be very explicit about what will be accomplished with the funding and what impacts will occur if the project is not funded. It will also convince the reader that the proposed solution is well researched and workable. The more evidence that the solution has been developed by and/or reviewed by experts, the easier it will be to convince readers (panel members) that the solution is appropriate and workable.