Fluor has agreed to pay $1.1 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that it had improperly used federal money to lobby for funds for the HAMMER training center at Hanford, the company announced yesterday. Fluor stressed in a release that it believes it did nothing “wrong nor unlawful,” but agreed to the settlement proposed by the U.S. government “in the belief that the avoidance of the expense and distraction of litigation is in the Company’s best interests.”
The settlement resolves a lawsuit first filed in 2011 by Loydene Rambo, who previously was a contracting official for the HAMMER facility. The suit, which was taken over by the Department of Justice last fall, alleged that Fluor Hanford had improperly bill the Department of Energy for costs incurred to market the HAMMER facility for training of other government agencies. Fluor Hanford was responsible for the HAMMER facility from 1996 to 2009. In its release yesterday, Fluor said that its contract with DOE “obligated the Company to encourage other government agencies to use the HAMMER facility to ‘increase economies of scale and promote more cost-effective operation and maintenance" and to promote HAMMER’s use by these additional agencies to reduce the facility’s funding requirements (thereby reducing costs to taxpayers).”
Fluor added that it had been “prepared to prove that the use of consultants to contact other government agencies to market the HAMMER facility was fully known to and overseen by ranking Department of Energy officials, who themselves were involved in meetings and communications with the consultants, and other government agencies, and that there was nothing improper about these marketing efforts by either DOE or Fluor.”