ARLINGTON, VA — During a conference dominated by workforce continuity issues, it was noted Friday that Department of Energy field office managers for nuclear cleanup, who often head the biggest employers in rural locales, have been in their current posts for less than five years.
Being a major government employer in small-town America poses unique challenges ranging from attracting talented new staff to picking locations for electric vehicle charging, panel members said, said Reinhard Knerr of the Carlsbad, N.M. field office that oversee the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). Knerr’s remarks came during the National Cleanup Workshop hosted by Energy Communities Alliance.
More than a dozen Environmental Management field offices across the country are often responsible for local oversight of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money.
“Almost half of our office has been brought onboard in the last two years,” Knerr said. The Carlsbad office and WIPP contractors must compete with the gas-and-oil production business for staff, Knerr said.
Environmental Management’s field office manager for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Michael Mikolanis said the legacy cleanup contractor there also has to compete with the laboratory itself for workers.
While they tend to be old hands at DOE and the federal government, about five years is the longest tenure among current managers at the Office of Environmental Management’s biggest field operations, the bosses said during the Friday panel. That includes the Hanford Site in Washington state and to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina — places where the field office managers are responsible for a budget north of $1 billion and upwards of 10,000 employees.
Idaho Falls Mayor Rebecca Casper asked the Office of Environmental Management field managers about their tenure during the Friday session.
Savannah River Site manager Michael Budney has led Environmental Management operations at the South Carolina federal site for nearly five years, saying that equals 35 years in DOE “dog years.”
Hanford manager Brian Vance became acting top boss for both Hanford’s Office of River Protection and the Richland Operations Office in February 2019 after Richland Ops Office Manager Doug Shoop retired. Vance was named permanent manager for both offices in July 2020.
The others on the panel — acting Oak Ridge manager in Tennessee, Laura Wilkerson; Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office boss Joel Bradburne; Idaho National Laboratory cleanup manager Connie Flohr; Mikolanis of Los Alamos; Knerr at Carlsbad and Jack Zimmerman of the Cincinnati-based Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center — have been in their current posts three years or less.
