The U.S. Court of Federal Claims has granted the Small Business Administration Office of Hearings and Appeals 24 more days, until Nov. 12, to revisit on remand the issue of whether Swift & Staley is too big to qualify for a $160-million set-aside contract to provide landlord services at the Department of Energy’s Paducah Site in Kentucky.
The prior deadline for the decision on remand was Oct. 19. Lawyers for DOE, Swift & Staley and rival bidder Akima Intra-Data did not oppose the motion for more time.
The initial Oct. 19 deadline was set by Federal Claims Judge Thompson Dietz upon ruling in late August the SBA appeals panel was mistaken when it ruled in May that Swift & Staley was too big to qualify for the contract because of the Kentucky-based company’s minority stake, with North Wind Group, in the Portsmouth Mission Alliance. That joint venture holds the expiring 5-year, $190-million contract for support services at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
The SBA appeals board’s mistake, the Federal Claims Court said, was that the board failed to properly apply its own agency’s size determination rules for populated joint ventures: the sort that use their own employees to do the contract work.
But the court’s order left room for the Office of Hearings and Appeals (OHA) to find, notwithstanding, that Swift & Staley was too large to qualify for the small business contract. The OHA said in legal papers filed online with the Federal Claims Court that the October deadline failed to provide enough time to sift through “a number of complex issues” on remand.
Meanwhile, the Portsmouth landlord contract expires Nov. 22 and North Wind in September won a 5-year, $135-million contract that was promptly protested by Akima. “It would be infeasible for OHA to fully consider the issues raised and issue a decision within the time remaining in the original remand period.”
