Interstate Commission On The Potomac River Basin

Interstate Commission On The Potomac River Basin, doing business as Potomac River Commission, is a U.S. interstate government entity based in Rockville, Maryland that acts as a prime recipient of federal water-quality and environmental grants from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture, with no federal contract activity in the source data. The commission does not compete for contracts; it receives formula grants and project grants under federal environmental grant programs to support interstate water-quality management, ecosystem monitoring, and pollution control across the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay watersheds.

The commission is structured as an interstate compact entity representing multiple basin states and operates without SBA set-aside designations or federal contracting vehicles. Its federal footprint consists entirely of grant awards from EPA Region 3 and the National Resources Conservation Service, with no sub-awards in its prime grants but four sub-recipient relationships (with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the Maryland Department of the Environment, and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection) where other state agencies or nonprofits pass federal funding downstream to the commission for targeted watershed projects.

EPA Region 3 dominates the commission's customer concentration, accounting for 24 awards (9 formula grants and 15 other EPA awards) across the source data. The Department of Agriculture's National Resources Conservation Service awarded one cooperative agreement under the Soil and Water Conservation program (CFDA 10.902) for Little Pipe Creek technical assistance work. The commission's grant portfolio spans two decades and recent activity shows four awards in 2025 alone, driven by EPA formula grants and project grants. Named recent grants include a $650,000 formula grant from EPA Region 3 (CFDA 66.419, Water Pollution Control State, Interstate, and Tribal Program Support) running through September 2027 for interstate water-quality coordination and monitoring; a $1.7 million contingent project grant from EPA Region 3 for Chesapeake Bay Partnership data center and water-quality monitoring database operations (award date October 2023, completion September 2029); and a $123,000 cooperative agreement from the National Resources Conservation Service for Little Pipe Creek water-quality technical assistance (July 2021 through July 2022).

Deliverables across the grant portfolio center on water-quality data collection, database creation and maintenance, TMDL (Total Maximum Daily Load) support, ecosystem health assessment, emergency response modeling for river spills, stakeholder coordination, and educational outreach. The commission reports minimal Service Contract Inventory activity — 0.2 FTEs on a single SCI record in FY2024 as a named subcontractor — indicating that SCI-reportable service contracts are not a material revenue stream and that the commission's federal activity flows through grant mechanisms rather than purchased services contracts. One award (a $521,000 contingent formula grant from EPA Region 3, October 2023 through December 2025) includes a subaward to USGS for water-level monitoring in Adams County, Pennsylvania. The recompete cliff in the next twenty-four months consists of one award reaching completion.