Mobile District's Miriam Fleming won the "Recreation Employee of the Year" award in 2013 and for good reason. This energetic and intelligent ranger who once policed NASDAQ trades for fraud has been with the Corps for 11 years and has gained a reputation for her enlightened management, savvy IT skills and compelling interpretive programs.

One of her most recent contributions is a streamlined, innovative contract solicitation and management program. The program is hosted online, and provides detailed scope of work and project information, dramatically boosting the number of proposal submittals for the district's 118 contracts, improving the Corps' ability to identify strong contractors and reducing the time required to manage the contract-letting process by a month. She also modernized the contracting instrument for both park attendant and cost plus award fee contracts.

Concerned about the South Atlantic Division's poor budget performance, Miriam co-chaired an innovative Comprehensive Performance Review of the division's projects to explore possible data problems. She and the team uncovered numerous discrepancies in the OMBIL and Rec-BEST data sets, and by doing so the team was able to improve the Division's budget performance. Recognizing these discrepancies as a serious issue, efforts are now underway on a national level to create a mechanism that identifies discrepancies between OMBIL and Rec-BEST data.

Miriam frequently is invited to step in and help align budgets and service delivery at individual projects to ensure optimum benefit cost ratios. She explores individual PSA efficiencies and sometimes recommends PSA closures to boost budget performance.

Miriam also serves on the Partnership Advisory Committee, where she is developing a volunteer award program similar to the Excellence in Partnership awards. She is also exploring new ways to manage the Corps' vital relationships with its volunteers, encouraging rangers to take on the role as volunteer managers. Upon receiving her award, Miriam said, "I'm very proud of this award but I think I'm most proud that it was someone in the field, Lake Lanier's Darryl Stone, who wrote the glowing submission that won it for me."