GAO Upholds One of Two Protests Filed Against Portage’s Win
Mike Nartker
WC Monitor
5/23/2014
The Department of Energy’s long search for a new support services contractor for the Office of Legacy Management took another turn late this week, when the Government Accountability Office upheld one of two protests filed over DOE’s second decision to award the new contract to Portage, Inc. The GAO sustained portions of a protest filed by Navarro Research and Engineering, and as a result, has recommended that DOE re-evaluate the proposals of Navarro and Portage and make a new award decision, according to a statement from GAO Managing Associate General Counsel for Procurement Law Ralph White. Navarro should also be reimbursed for its protest costs, the GAO said.
According to the GAO, Navarro had alleged in its latest protest that “DOE failed to reasonably evaluate the relative merits of the proposals submitted by Navarro and Portage.” The GAO said it decided to sustain portions of Navarro’s protest “on the basis that DOE relied on several discriminators to differentiate the proposals of Navarro and Portage which were not supported by the record.” A second protest filed by WAI-Stoller Services, LLC, that “challenged the agency’s [DOE’s] evaluation of its proposal” was denied, the GAO said. DOE headquarters did not respond to requests for comment late this week on the GAO’s decision. Navarro and Portage each declined to comment. Wastren Advantage Inc. (WAI) did not respond to requests for comment.
Procurement Began in 2010
The new LM contract, which was set aside for small businesses, has been valued at approximately $251 million over five years. The procurement for the new contract stretches back more than three years, to October 2010, when DOE issued a sources sought notice to help determine whether 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 selected Portage as the winner in April 2013, prompting initial protests by Navarro and WAI-Stoller.
In May 2013, DOE chose to take corrective action in response to the protests and re-evaluated bids, leading to a second decision early this year to again award the new contract to Portage. That action triggered the second round of protests from Navarro and WAI-Stoller leading to this week’s GAO decision. Notably, the search for the new LM support services contractor now appears set to take longer to complete than the National Nuclear Security Administration’s own lengthy procurement for a new contract to manage the Y-12 and Pantex sites—a contract that with a total value of more than $22 billion is approximately 10 times larger than the new LM contract. The Y-12/Pantex procurement got underway in March 2010 and was finally wrapped up in February of this year.
Stoller Continues Work
While Navarro was successful this week in its protest, the bigger winner, at least in the near-term, appears to be S.M. Stoller (now a wholly owned subsidiary of Huntingon Ingalls Industries), the incumbent LM support services contractor. Stoller’s contract was initially set to expire in September 2012, but DOE has issued multiple extensions while the search for a replacement continues. Stoller was unable to lead a bid of its own for the new contract because it no longer met the size standard for the small business procurement, leading it to join the team led by WAI. In late March, DOE exercised yet another option to keep Stoller in place, this time until the end of June. The total amount of the latest ceiling increase is approximately $47 million, according to DOE.