Idaho-based North Wind Portage is expected to remain on the job as a remediation contractor for up to two more years at an old Department of Energy research site within the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Simi Valley, Calif., the Department of Energy said this week.
In an amendment to a justification for an exception to fair opportunity posted Thursday on the federal procurement website, sam.gov, DOE wrote that it plans a 24-month, noncompetitive extension of the ordering period for North Wind task orders for monitoring, decontamination and decommissioning at the Energy Technology Engineering Center (ETEC).
According to material published with the notice, A DOE contracting officer, John Blecher, signed off Aug. 10 on extending North Wind’s task order on a sole-source basis up to two years “in the interest of economy and efficiency” to ensure completion of ongoing cleanup work. A chart of DOE contracts updated this week indicates North Wind had been extended until September 2023.
This latest change to the current agreement, in the form of a one-year extension and two six-month options that DOE could exercise, would potentially be worth $4.1 million. The current task order value is $43.4 million. North Wind’s task orders at the Southern California site stem from its participation in an Environmental Management Nationwide indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity restricted contracts. Its task order was last extended, by two years, in March 2019.
The DOE cleanup office issued a request for information on the ETEC business in August 2020 but did not follow up with a request for proposals.
Work at Santa Susana has dragged on at ETEC in part due to “various delays in schedule primarily caused by prolonged negotiations with the state regulators and the DOE Headquarters delay in issuing a Record of Decision (ROD) for soil remediation,” according to the document. North Wind has “successfully demolished 16 of the 18 DOE-owned buildings that remained at ETEC at the beginning of NWP’s contract.”
Boeing is the landlord of the 2,700-acre Santa Susana property. It and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) did rocket-engine research there for decades. The DOE leased about 450 acres of the property and did nuclear energy and related research on the 90-acre ETEC site.
The California Department of Toxic Substances Control oversees cleanup efforts at Santa Susana by DOE, Boeing and NASA.
Questions can be directed to DOE’s Blecher, [email protected].
