How Government Grants Can Use Innovative Contracting Methods to Open Rivers for Fish

Culverts dot the landscape of many states, allowing water to move under roadways but in a constrained way that impairs fish and other species’ passage in streams and riverways. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), there are almost 70 million culverts under roads that were built using designs that neglected impacts to aquatic species in the nation’s waterways. Removing these passage barriers is critical to restoring the health of certain aquatic species, and can have other important co-benefits such as flood risk reduction and local job creation. To address this problem, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) provided multiple agencies with nearly $2 billion for aquatic and ecosystem restoration that supports fish passage. The IIJA will fund projects over five years (FY2022 - FY2026) and could result in a transformational impact to aquatic species, their habitats, and the surrounding communities. This report focuses on the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWY) Culvert Aquatic Organism Passage (AOP) Program, a new program at the DOT with $1 billion in funding over five years to address culverts and weirs that have a transportation nexus.

The use of alternative delivery procurement approaches - procurement methods that break from the status quo - could speed culvert project implementation by making it easier to deploy this funding faster to great projects. Alternative delivery procurement methods considered in this report, that are most relevant to fish passage projects, include public-private partnerships (P3s), full delivery contracts that combine design and implementation, and Pay for Success (PFS) models. In general, these methods allow the government to define the outcome it seeks and the private and nonprofit sectors to use specialized expertise to select and implement projects efficiently and cost-effectively. These methods shift the risk of project success from the government to the project developer, and lower the capacity needs of the government to sort through and select from large applicant pools of projects.