March 17, 2014

WHAT IF AMWTP WAS RUN THROUGH CONSOLIDATED BUSINESS CENTER?

By ExchangeMonitor

In hindsight, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental may have been better served by not running the search for a new managing contractor for the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project through the DOE Idaho Operations Office, according to Deputy Assistant EM Secretary for Acquisition and Contract Management Jack Surash. “I think if we had to do it again—if we ran AMWTP out of our central process like we did for just about anything else—things might have went better [and] faster. … That took way too long, unfortunately,” Surash said in remarks yesterday at this year’s Weapons Complex Monitor Decisionmakers’ Forum. “The contracts that we’ve run centrally out of EM through our Consolidated Business Center, I think, have really progressed and … improvements have really been made there. So I think if we were to do it again, running it through our EM Acquisition Center, we might not have run into some of the issues that we saw on that particular source selection.”

On Oct. 1, B&W-led Idaho Treatment Group, LLC, officially took over as the new managing contractor for the AMWTP at DOE’s Idaho site, finally wrapping up a procurement that had become infamous for the time it took to complete. DOE’s search for a new AMWTP contractor began in the summer of 2008, when a draft Request for Proposals was issued for industry comment. Bids for the new contract were submitted in early 2009, and in late March 2010, DOE announced that CH2M Hill Newport News Nuclear,LLC, had won the new contract, valued at that time at approximately $600 million. Competing teams led by Bechtel and B&W subsequently filed protests over the award with the GAO in April 2010, and the following month DOE agreed to take corrective action in response. In October 2010, DOE notified the three teams that it would seek a new of ‘best and final offers’ from each for evaluation to make a new award decision, with the revised bids submitted by the end of last year. In late May, DOE announced the Idaho Treatment Group was the new winner of the contract. However, because of the time it took DOE to make its new decision, the value of the contract dropped by approximately one-third, to $417 million through Sept. 30, 2015.

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