Needs Assessment

[John McClurkan]

I have been tasked with updating our state soil commission’s strategic plan, and I was wondering if you know if NRCS or any other NASCA states have ever done a “needs assessment” or “gap analysis” to estimate how much additional funding and manpower would be necessary to address all the soil/water conservation concerns across a state/region.

[David Copeland]

John – My agency, the MN Board of Water and Soil Resources, provided state grant funds to a regional Joint Powers Board to conduct a Workload Analysis. The consultant hired to conduct the analysis and write the report looked at state and federal funding expected over the next several years, staffing available, and a gap analysis of staff years and positions needed to meet the full funding demand. If you email me I can send you the Report.

[Jake Wilson]

Hey John,

In MO, we have each district complete a comprehensive needs assessment every year. We require that they enter at least two years’ worth of data about how much funding is needed for each of the seven resource concern areas that we fund via the state.  The data is actually entered in our online cost-share management system by the district employees, but each board signs a printed copy as well. The reality is that the stated need always far exceeds the funding available and we end up using previous years completed work to divvy up funding for each district. The figures from the needs assessment are more of a tool that we can use to communicate the amount of need that is unmet with our current appropriation. This does not address person-power needed, but we have a pretty good idea how much time it takes to get various practices implemented because all district staff use a common time reporting system that records what specific practices they are working on. One last caveat is that this only addresses state funded conservation practices and does not take into account anything federal. Our current state cost-share appropriation is $50 million annually and there are around 280 district staff spread out across 114 SWCDs. Our latest needs assessment was conducted in Oct. and shows an estimated need of $141 million in FY26. That is just the estimated annual need for that year.

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