The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) is tweaking its approach to the so-called “end states” road map to environmental remediation for the Central Plateau at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The office on Wednesday published a notice of its modification to the end-state model championed by Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White. She has spoken enthusiastically of reinvigorating the completion mindset for cleanup jobs at the 16 sites EM oversees.
The end states method calls for vendors to detail in contract bids how much remediation they can achieve within 10 years, in order to accelerate work. The Central Plateau was the first big DOE procurement in which bidders were asked to provide that information. It is anticipated to be applied to several additional solicitations in the near future.
After issuing a draft request for proposals (RFP) in September for the $6.5 billion, 10-year Central Plateau contract, Environmental Management received stakeholder feedback suggesting it was trying to make too many changes too fast. Sources from two different companies had predicted DOE would have to take some action following a flood of industry comments on the complexity of the draft RFP.
The “Modification to End State Contracting Model,” as it is called, does not say if DOE is actually withdrawing the draft RFP. The Energy Department did not respond to a request for comment at press time. It typically does not respond to procurement questions.
“Industry was concerned with evaluation fairness due to the fact that industry would be proposing different end states and potential regulatory frameworks,” according to material released on the FedBizOpps website.
As a result of the feedback, DOE is now proposing a single-award indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract “with the ability to issue both cost reimbursable (CR) and firm-fixed-price task orders.”
The Office of Environmental Management anticipates this will provide the flexibility “to openly negotiate the right end states and regulatory framework” to eventually reach completion at Cold War nuclear sites. The Energy Department will seek to pick “the best value partner” to negotiate task orders and requirements with, according to the notice.
Comments on the modification should be submitted by Dec. 21 to [email protected].
The notice is a positive change from the earlier Central Plateau draft RFP because it provides a more incremental revision to procurement policy, an industry source said Friday. It is easier to understand and digest, he said.
The earlier draft RFP included hundreds of tasks that, if missed, could trigger a significant fee reduction, the source said. He was unclear what effect this notice will have on the ultimate timing of the Central Plateau procurement. The most recent DOE schedule, issued last month, calls for the final RFP to go out in January 2019 with the award coming in early 2020.
The Energy Department said in the notice the revised end states approach should reduce the industry’s costs for preparing bid packages. The agency will retain the carrot of a potential 15 percent fee, from the initial end state approach.
The original Central Plateau contract would include demolishing structures, managing transuranic waste, complying with the Tri-Party Agreement on Hanford cleanup, and other remediation-related tasks at Central Plateau. This week’s notice does not mention any changes in the work.
On Sept. 27, DOE also granted incumbent CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation a one-year extension through September 2019.
