While some work at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management is being delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, contract procurement has hardly missed a beat, officials told an online industry conference this week.
Thus far in 2020 there have been “almost no drop offs [and] ironically enough, almost some acceleration” in contract solicitations and awards, the Office of Environmental Management’s No. 2 official, Todd Shrader, told the Tennessee-based Energy Technology and Environmental Business Association on Tuesday.
Requests for proposals (RFPs) for the agency’s nuclear cleanup unit have effectively “gone virtual” since mid-March, including industry day meetings, Norbert Doyle, deputy assistant secretary for EM’s acquisition and project management, told the same conference this week.
“Although COVID has changed the way we operate in some regards, the balls are moving forward” on procurement, Doyle said.
Beginning in March, DOE’s Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center in Cincinnati, started posting quarterly updates on the status of final RFPs. The most recent version came out in August. Thus far the procurement office has mostly kept to the schedule predicted in the updates, Doyle said.
There are some exceptions. The final procurement for the Uranium Mill Tailings Removal Action Project in Moab, Utah was supposed to be out in December and now looks like January, Doyle said. He did not specify the reason for the slippage.
The agency does still expect to award its stand-alone contract for the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina this year, Doyle said.
Award of a new paramilitary security contract for the Savannah River Site has moved slowly in part because DOE dealt with a protest, Doyle said. “But we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he added, without saying when to expect an award. Some industry officials have said it could come by year’s end.
The current quarterly update system replaced an Office of Environmental Management summary chart that was more elaborately detailed, with date ranges on when final awards could be expected. A couple of years ago during a question-and-answer session at a Phoenix conference, industry contractors and subcontractors urged Doyle to keep publishing a regular procurement update but with more reliable schedules.