As part of its mission to proudly support the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council (GCERC), VMSI staff have been actively engaged in the development of the GCERC’s electronic grants management system since 2014. The Restoration Assistance and Award Management System—or RAAMS—was launched and began accepting grant and interagency agreement applications in early 2016.

As of July 2016, VMSI was awarded a follow on contract to provide Technical/Help Desk services for the management, configuration, deployment, and technical support of RAAMS, which is utilized by Council staff to capture project and program objectives, progress, outcomes, metrics, and other data necessary for ecosystem restoration evaluation and adaptive management.

VMSI personnel coordinate the deployment of patches and software updates, test updates for bugs and compatibility with existing data prior to production deployment, develop custom web forms to capture data elements required for various grant and interagency agreement processes, construct queries and reports that enable GCERC staff to quickly access electronic data, and continually refine the process flows and tasks that drive public user and staff actions within the system.

The GCERC was established by Congress as part of the Resources and Ecosystems Sustainability, Tourist Opportunities, and Revived Economies of the Gulf Coast States Act of 2012 (RESTORE Act) to help restore the ecosystem and economy of the Gulf Coast region after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The Council comprises the Governors of the States of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas; the Secretaries of the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Army, Commerce, Homeland Security, and the Interior; and the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.