At least one company that unsuccessfully bid against Tennessee-based Navarro Research and Engineering for the new Technical Assistance Contract at the Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico will be debriefed next week by the Department of Energy, a source said Thursday.
The DOE announced July 1 that Navarro won a potential five-year, $100-million technical assistance contract for the Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. North Wind Portage is the incumbent under a $57-million contract set to expire Aug. 31.
The source who spoke by phone with Weapons Complex Monitor said Navarro offered the lowest price out of seven bidders. That should make a bid protest to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) difficult because price tends to carry a lot of weight in federal procurements, he said.
No matter the listed factors for the basis of award, the DOE Office of Environmental Management seemingly almost always boils down to the price, the industry source said.
For its part, the DOE said in the solicitation that it was seeking the “best value” to the government.
“The Government is more concerned with obtaining a superior technical and management proposal than making award at the lowest evaluated price,” according to the request for proposals. “The evaluation factors for the Technical and Management Proposal, when combined, are more important than the evaluated price [but] the Government will not make an award at a price premium it considers disproportionate to the benefits associated with the evaluated superiority” of the proposal.
Federal rules on protests spell out what losing parties must do in order to have a federal agency hold off on issuance of a new contract while a challenge goes forward to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).. It combines both a 10-day clock upon award of the contract, and a five-day clock after the debrief. A losing party should do both in order to suspend the award, said a source familiar with the GAO process. Once DOE awards a contract, losing bidders have five days after receiving a competition debrief from the agency to protest the award to the Government Accountability Office.
A decision to protest, or not, might hinge on how closely the bidder believes the department adhered to the award criteria outlined in the request for proposals.
The indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract with task orders calls upon Navarro to provide technical assistance to Carlsbad on a wide range of issues, from nuclear safety and regulatory compliance to the characterization of defense-related transuranic waste headed to WIPP from DOE sites for underground disposal.
Elsewhere in the DOE cleanup complex, the woman-owned Navarro holds the potentially five-year, $389-million contract for management of the 222-S Laboratory at the DOE’s Hanford Site in Washington state, which runs into September 2025. Navarro is also the environmental program services provider at the Nevada National Security Site under a potentially 10-year, $350-million contract that runs through September 2030.
Navarro was previously a support services contractor to the DOE’s Office of Legacy Management but lost the business in June 2020 after GAO upheld the $191-million contract award to Tennessee-based RSI EnTech. Navarro’s subsequent challenge in federal court also failed.
