Mike Nartker
WC Monitor
8/29/2014
The long-running search for a new support services contractor for the Department of Energy’s Office of Legacy Management now appears set to run on for at least a little while longer, with DOE asking bidders this week to extend their proposals’ expiration dates by another two months, to Oct. 31. DOE is currently in the midst of a third evaluation of the eight bids submitted for the new contract, which was set aside for small businesses, with previous award decisions having been challenged to the Government Accountability Office. The Department declined to comment this week when asked when it expects to make a new award, as well as if any changes have been made to the Source Selection Official for the procurement and about DOE’s plan to provide another extension to incumbent S.M Stoller, whose contract is currently set to expire Sept. 30. DOE’s request to extend the bids submitted for the new contract has been met with frustration from industry officials. “It’s hard to imagine how two more months of evaluation can make a significant difference in the outcome. DOE continues to struggle with this procurement and it’s hard to imagine a positive outcome for the industry at this point,” one industry official said.
The new Legacy Management support services contract has been valued at approximately $250 million over five years. The procurement for the new contract stretches back to the fall of 2010, when the Department began conducting market research to determine if the contract could continue to be set-aside for small businesses. The Department issued a Request for Proposals in November 2011, and bids were due by mid-February 2012. DOE initially awarded the contract to Portage last April, leading to challenges from Navarro and the team of Wastren Advantage-S.M. Stoller. In response, DOE chose last May to take corrective action by re-evaluating all eight bids, and then chose again early this year to award the new contract to Portage. Both Navarro and the WAI-Stoller team again protested DOE’s decision, and this spring the GAO sustained Navarro’s protest but denied WAI-Stoller’s.
Previous Award Decision ‘Flawed,’ GAO Found
In its decision sustaining Navarro’s second protest, the GAO said that Navarro had scored higher than Portage after DOE re-evaluated proposals after the first protest. Navarro’s bid scored 940 out of 940 available points and received an “excellent” overall technical rating. Portage’s bid also received an “excellent” overall technical rating, but earned 920 out of 940 points, with the contractor having received 80 out of 100 available points in the area of past performance. Navarro’s bid was slightly more expensive than Portage’s—approximately $260 million versus $251 million, according to the GAO decision.
While both Navarro and Portage received the same adjectival ratings for their bids, DOE decided that “Portage’s proposals contained certain discriminators that set it apart from Navarro’s proposal,” the GAO decision states. Navarro charged in its second protest, though, that the discriminators used to support the decision to award the contract to Portage were “unreasonable and not supported by the record”—an allegation the GAO ultimately supported. “Upon review, the record reflects that several of these discriminators do not withstand scrutiny, and were the result of unreasonable conclusions, unequal evaluations, or inaccurate judgments regarding the differences between the two proposals. As a result, we conclude that the best value decision was flawed,” the GAO said.
The GAO recommended that DOE re-evaluate the bids submitted by Portage and Navarro and come up with a new award decision. In June, though, DOE informed the bidders on the new contract that it would re-evaluate all eight bids submitted and would determine a path forward once that re-evaluation was complete. DOE declined to comment when asked this week why it chose to re-evaluate all of the bids submitted, rather than just Navarro’s and Portage’s as the GAO had recommended.
