Navarro Research and Engineering faces no challenges to Energy Department contract it won last month for a potential 10-year, $350 million contract to continue providing environmental services at the Nevada National Security Site.
The Energy Department awarded the contract to the incumbent on June 17. The window for protest to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) expired July 2, a source said Monday.
A protest challenging the award of a contract must be filed within 10 days of the date a bidder learns the details of an agency’s selection, according to the GAO website. With DOE contracts, the protest must typically come within five days of the required debriefing for losing teams. No protest was posted as of deadline Friday.
Only one other bidder, which has not been identified by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, submitted a proposal for the small business set-aside contract. Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based Navarro’s current contract from March 2015 is valued at less than $85 million and expires at the end of this month.
Navarro recently earned about 93% of its total potential fee for its environmental work at the Nevada site over a 16-month period ended Jan. 31.
There is a 60-day transition period to the new contract, a DOE spokesperson said recently.
The $350 million figure represents the maximum contract income, and the actual value will hinge on the number of tasks done by Navarro.
Under the contract, Navarro will provide services ranging from groundwater monitoring to decontamination and decommissioning at the Nevada National Security Site, as well as the Nevada Test and Training Range and the Tonopah Test Range. The company also manages the Radioactive Waste Acceptance Program (RWAP), which accepts low-level radioactive waste from other government nuclear sites for disposal at the Nevada National Security Site.
It’s very rare for such a large DOE contract not to draw a protest, the same industry source said Tuesday.
Last week, a different industry source said his company did not bid on the Nevada work because, after reviewing the RFP language, the vendor decided it would be difficult to dislodge the incumbent.
Navarro is alone this year among vendors selected for DOE Environmental Management contracts worth over $100 million to avoid a protest at the GAO. The congressional auditor this spring dismissed objections to two major awards at the Hanford Site in Washington state, and is still reviewing a protest against a contract awarded to a BWX Technologies-led group in May for management and eventual closure of 177 underground tanks holding radiological and chemical waste.
