With a bid protest pending on a five-year contract, it appears three contractors will for the time being continue to provide technical support services for the U.S. Energy Department’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office.
A roundup of major procurements at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, updated Wednesday, shows the stopgap extension to Nov. 30 for the Portsmouth Environmental Technical Services award held by Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based RSI EnTech. The contract otherwise would have expired Oct. 1. The business has been worth nearly $52 million since RSI started work on its initial five-year contract in October 2013.
The Energy Department is apparently providing similar extensions with the other two firms, after signaling in January it could keep the existing vendors in place through the end of 2019 via extensions that last a few months at a time.
In late August, the Energy Department again awarded a consolidated technical support contract worth about $137 million to a subsidiary of Oak Ridge-based Pro2Serve, Enterprise Technical Assistance Services (E-TAS). That was the second award to E-TAS, both of which have drawn protests from rival bidder Strategic Management Solutions, of Albuquerque, N.M.
The Pro2Serve company originally won the business on June 29, 2018. But DOE withdrew the award a couple months later after the rival’s protest filed with the Government Accountability Office.
The consolidated contract includes administrative and support to DOE for remediation at the Portsmouth Site in Pike County, Ohio, and the Paducah Site in Paducah, Ky., along with support for depleted uranium hexafluoride conversion (DUF6) operations at the two former gaseous diffusion sites. The work, which also includes support for safeguards and security, is currently split between RSI (Portsmouth), Strategic Management Solutions (DUF6), and Pro2Serve (Paducah). The three vendors have received a series of stopgap extensions in the past year.
