Incumbent to Receive Another Extension, To End of March
Mike Nartker
WC Monitor
12/5/2014
The long-running search for a new support services contractor for the Department of Energy’s Office of Legacy Management may now stretch into 2015, with DOE asking bidders this week to again extend their proposals’ expiration dates, this time by another six weeks to the end of January. The move came a little more than a week after DOE indicated that a third award decision for the contract could be made by early December. DOE late this week confirmed the extension request, but declined to provide any further comment.
DOE is currently in the midst of a third evaluation of the bids submitted for the new Legacy Management contract, which was set-aside for small businesses and has been valued at approximately $250 million over five years. The procurement for the new contract stretches back to the fall of 2010, when the Department began conducting market research to determine if the contract could continue to be set-aside for small businesses. The Department issued a Request for Proposals in November 2011, and bids were due by mid-February 2012. DOE initially awarded the contract to Portage last April, leading to challenges from Navarro and the team of Wastren Advantage-S.M. Stoller. In response, DOE chose last May to take corrective action by re-evaluating all eight bids, and then chose again early this year to award the new contract to Portage. Both Navarro and the WAI-Stoller team again protested DOE’s decision, and this spring the GAO sustained Navarro’s protest but denied WAI-Stoller’s.
In late November, DOE issued a document that said the Department expected to complete the corrective action it has undertaken in response to Navarro’s successful protest in “November, early December 2014.” DOE also said in the document that it intends to provide another three-month extension to the contract held by incumbent S.M. Stoller (now a wholly owned subsidiary of Huntington Ingalls Industries), which would run through the end of March 2015. The value of the extension is approximately $16.8 million, according to the document and information previously provided by DOE. Stoller’s contract was initially supposed to expire in September 2012, and the company had been unable to lead a bid of its own for the follow-on contract because it did not meet the size standard employed for the procurement.
