There could be more leadership changes at Energy Department sites with a CH2M Hill Co. presence, thanks to a corporate-level reorganization that has already precipitated a top-spot swap at a key DOE cleanup contractor for the Hanford Site in Washington state.
CH2M announced the pending restructuring in a Wednesday 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, two days after news broke that John Ciucci would step down as president of CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. (CHPRC) and take a job at the company’s corporate office in Denver. The move, Ciucci told employees at Hanford, was part of the corporate reorganization.
CH2M spokeswoman Lorri Crum declined to comment about the reorganization’s specific effect on the DOE complex, but said that, company wide, “some leaders who have worked on some projects will be working in a new role, whether it’s in the corporate organization at CH2M or in other parts of the company.”
Ciucci will be replaced at CHPRC by Ty Blackford, a Hanford Site veteran now at Savannah River Remediation. Several other personnel shifts are also being made at the DOE contractor.
Besides leading solid waste cleanup at Hanford under a 10-year contract awarded in 2008 and worth roughly $6 billion, CH2M is the junior partner in the AECOM-led UCOR: prime contractor for demolition and decommissioning of the former uranium enrichment campus at the Oak Ridge site in Tennessee under a nine-year contract awarded in 2011 and worth roughly $2.5 billion. CH2M also leads the CH2M Hill BWXT West Valley joint venture that handles cleanup of the West Valley Demonstration Project in upstate New York under a roughly $525 million contract awarded in 2011 and good through at least early 2020.
Aside from the Hanford Site leadership changes, none of those CH2M affiliates had announced personnel changes at press time for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. CH2M’s contracts for DOE Office of Environmental Management have been a bright spot in the company’s sometimes disappointing earnings this year.
As part of the corporate reorganization, expected to be complete by the first quarter of 2017, CH2M is cutting its global workforce of roughly 22,000 by 800 — roughly a 3 percent cut, according to Wednesday’s 8-K.
By early January, CH2M will replace its four vertically integrated, industry-focused business units with three horizontal units focused on the company’s customers: national governments; state and local governments; and the private sector, Crum said. The company’s DOE legacy waste cleanup work, now encompassed in the Nuclear and Environment segment, will be folded into the new national government’s segment.
