EM to Stand Up Los Alamos Field Office on March 22

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management plans to formally stand up its new Los Alamos field office next week on March 22, EM Acting Assistant Secretary Mark Whitney said yesterday at the Waste Management Conference in Phoenix. DOE is in the midst of shifting LANL cleanup work to EM from the National Nuclear Security Administration, and last week announced that EM Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary for Waste Management Christine Gelles will be acting manager of the new office until a permanent manager is appointed. “There really won’t be much of a difference at all initially logistically, but we will have Christine in place there leading the office,” Whitney told WC Monitor on the sidelines of the conference. “All the employees, who for the most part are EM employees, will report directly to her and they will report directly to me. So that will streamline that whole reporting process, so that will be very helpful given where we are right now in trying to establish on the contractor side the direct reporting relationship with EM.”

 

EM is now launching a new procurement for the legacy cleanup work for the lab. DOE is currently recruiting four key new positions for the office, including a field office manager, deputy manager, regulatory specialist and contracting officer. It will also conduct a staffing analysis to “determine what additional resources and skills and bodies we are going to need to get to where we need to be when we take over the contract fully and have a new contractor on board,” Whitney said. “I anticipate there are going to be some additional needs, but we are going to do that staffing analysis first.”