Mike Nartker
WC Monitor
2/6/2015
A week after announcing that Navarro Research and Engineering is the newest winner of the support services contract for the Department of Energy’s Office of Legacy Management, DOE is so far staying quiet as to the basis of its decision. DOE declined to comment late this week on why it chose Navarro to now be the winner of the contract after having previously selected Portage as the winner twice before. It remains to be seen if DOE’s choice of Navarro will bring the infamous and long-running procurement to an end; the Department is expected to hold debriefs with the bidders on the contract next week, after which protests could again be filed with the Government Accountability Office.
The new LM support services contract was set-aside for small businesses, and is expected to run for five years. According to a notice posted on the FedBizOpps website late last week announcing the award to Navarro, the contract is worth approximately $257.2 million. DOE has sought for years to compete and award the contract, with the procurement stretching 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. DOE issued a Request for Proposals in November 2011, and bids were due by mid-February 2012, with reportedly eight companies submitting offers. DOE initially awarded the contract to Portage in April 2013, leading to challenges from Navarro and a team led by Wastren Advantage that includes incumbent S.M. Stoller (now known as Stoller Newport News Nuclear).
In response to the first challenge, DOE chose in May 2013 to take corrective action by re-evaluating all eight bids, and then chose again in early 2014 to award the new contract to Portage. Both Navarro and the WAI-Stoller team again protested DOE’s decision, and in the spring of 2014, the GAO sustained Navarro’s protest but denied WAI-Stoller’s.
Navarro Scored Higher Previously
In its decision backing Navarro’s protest, the GAO said 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.
DOE Bid Evaluation ‘Flawed,’ GAO Found
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. “Overall, the SSO determined that based on several discriminators, Portage’s proposal was superior to Navarro’s under the three most important technical factors, notwithstanding the same adjectival ratings, and therefore, represented the best value to the government,” the GAO said.
In its second protest, though, Navarro charged 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.
