The California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) has a budget of $4.58 billion for the 2017-18 fiscal year. The budget for CalEPA alone is $22.1 million.
The agency’s mission is to restore and protect the environment by developing and enforcing regulatory laws.
CalEPA oversees the Air Resources Board, Resources Recycling and Recovery, the State Water Resources Control Board, Department of Toxic Substances Control, the Department of Pesticide Regulation and the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.
All six of the departments share a building with the agency and share IT hardware.
Sergio Gutierrez, the Agency Information Officer, has been with the agency for seven years and has worked for the state for 25 years.
The agency has most recently completed its migration to Office365 and the buildout of a Regulated Site Portal, which was used during California’s wildfires to help pinpoint toxic risk areas. The interactive system is built on Windsor Solutions’ Insite software and was funded partially by federal EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) grants. It will eventually include a mobile component and more data sets.
Next the agency will work on finishing an environmental complaint system “designed to make it easy for the public, with very little information on regulatory agencies, to be able to submit a complaint,” Gutierrez said. “The system has some intelligence built into it, some workflow to route that to the appropriate agency.”
Both the complaint system and the agency’s correspondence tracking system will be built on Salesforce systems within about a year, Gutierrez said. The complaint system will be a mobile app that allows for photo attachments. The correspondence system will minimize paperwork and allow for electronic signatures.
The departments and CalEPA also use cloud services from the California Department of Technology as well as other software-as-a-service options.
“I think the industry in general is getting out of the hardware business and continuing to move into these cloud technologies. The time to market is faster, the procurements are easier, the overall risks to purchase are less,” Gutierrez said.
This story was updated at April 2 to correct the agency's budget amount in the first paragraph. The story was updated on April 6 to clarify the agency budget and Gutierrez's title.
