Having already granted one contract extension, the U.S. Energy Department proposes to keep incumbent Savannah River Remediation (SRR) in charge of liquid waste management at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina into 2019.
In a March 21 notice on a federal contracts website, DOE announced plans to retain SRR for up to another 10 months, to the end of March 2019. The contractor’s current deal lasts until May 31, under a five-month extension issued in December while DOE wrestles with a protest against the follow-on liquid waste contract.
In October, the Energy Department issued a 10-year, $4.7 billion contract to Savannah River EcoManagement, a joint venture comprised of BWX Technologies, Bechtel, and Honeywell. Formal protests from the other two bidding teams quickly followed: The Government Accountability Office in February upheld the objection from an AECOM-CH2M team and dismissed the protest from a Fluor-Westinghouse venture.
A DOE procurement official said last week at the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix, Ariz., the department hopes to re-award a long-term contract for liquid waste management at SRS by late summer or early fall. The department is asking all three bidding teams to revise their initial proposals, after the GAO said DOE’s Office of Environmental Management failed to fully ensure the new waste processing technical approach advanced by the low bidder would actually work.
Extending Savannah River Remediation’s current contract would ensure critical treatment and disposal work at SRS continues until the long-term contract issue is resolved, DOE said in the notice. The SRR venture consists of AECOM, Bechtel, CH2M, and BWXT.
The agency is proposing the extension under an exclusion in federal contracts regulation, which allows less than “full and open competition” when there is only one source that can realistically meet the government’s needs within a limited time frame. “Essentially, SRR is the only company qualified to show a new contractor the current operational parameters of the [liquid waste] system,” according to the notice.
The extension would keep SRR on the job managing 35 million gallons of Cold War-era liquid waste at Savannah River. Responses to the DOE notice are due by April 5. The notice did not explicitly say if parties are allowed to contest the contract extension.
Two industry sources contacted this week said they did not expect the notice to draw much formal comment because DOE is likely to grant some sort of extension, although no one knows how quickly the department will resolve the procurement situation following the GAO protests.
