While would-be bidders mull over the Department of Energy’s request for proposals to manage the Los Alamos National Laboratory for the next decade, a community representative is cautiously breathing a sigh of relief that the agency has made some concession to the local businesses for which the lab is lifeblood.
The final solicitation was “surprising and encouraging,” Andrea Romero, executive director of the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities, told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor this week.
Romero praised the solicitation for directing the eventual lab contractor to give preferential treatment to small local businesses when contracting for goods and services. She also lauded the Department of Energy (DOE) for continuing a program that lets local businesses participate in technology transfers with LANL, whereby northern New Mexico companies get the chance to help commercialize lab discoveries.
However, Romero worried that the final solicitation did not go far enough to pressure would-be primes to include small businesses in their bids.
As one of its three award criteria, the final solicitation requires bidders to identify their small business partners, though it does not force teams to reserve any specific portion of the work for smaller companies. In Romero’s opinion, that means bidders “don’t have to commit to any small business in any sort of meaningful way.”
Nor did bidders in the last LANL management competition in 2005. The solicitation for the current contract did not contain any set-aside provisions, nor did it elevate small business participation to the level of an award criterion, as the current RFP does.
Small businesses in the remote and rural northern New Mexico region relies heavily on LANL. In 2014, the most recent year for which complete data was readily available, the lab procured more than $280 million in goods and services from small businesses, about $200 million of which was spent in northern New Mexico.
DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration on Oct. 25 posted its final request for proposals to manage Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The 10-year contract includes a five-year base and five one-year options. The lab management portion of the contract will cost more than $21 billion over 10 years, including a little more than $10 billion in the base period, according to the NNSA.That excludes some $2 billion worth of work funded by agencies other than Energy over the life of the contract.
The next LANL contractor could earn up to $50 million a year in lab-management fees: an increase from the $30 million in the draft solicitation DOE released in July, and which generated some backlash. Locals worried the fees were too low to attract top-tier private companies that expect to turn a profit on any contract with the Energy Department
The University of California — the longtime LANL manager that together with senior corporate partner Bechtel National leads incumbent Los Alamos National Security — has all but confirmed it will bid for the next lab contract.
The University of Texas is likewise in pursuit of the contract, though as with University of California, the institution’s Board of Regents still has yet to officially approve any bid the Austin-based system might submit.
Texas A&M University this week acknowledged it wants a piece of the action at LANL, though the College Station-based system evidently will not be a part of University of Texas’ team.
“We contacted UT [the University of Texas] to discuss a partnership,” Katherine Banks, the A&M System’s vice chancellor for engineering, wrote in a Tuesday email. “We did not receive a response.”
The University of Texas told the Houston Chronicle last week it would not partner with its in-state rival.
Banks sidestepped a question about the public shrug-off from UT, telling NS&D Monitor that A&M has “been contacted by numerous private companies and academic institutions that have expressed interest in partnering with us in this competition,” and that “[w]e are confident that we will participate with strong partners.”
Only one of the major corporate partners in Los Alamos National Security, Lynchburg, Va.-based BWX Technologies, has even admitted it is evaluating the final request for proposals. Bechtel National, which has a mountain of past performance to leverage as part of a bid, has not replied to requests for comment. AECOM has likewise not replied to requests for comment, although the company specializes in the kind of construction work bundled into the solicitation.
Over the summer, a member of the University of California’s Board of Regents said the institution wanted to bid on the next LANL management pact with a different set of industry partners than those on Los Alamos National Security.
That echoed rumors, already prevalent at the time, that the University of California might seek out Honeywell, which over the last year has won a string of DOE contracts either as a prime or a team member. However, Honeywell said last week it would not bid.
Still playing coy this week was another company whose name has repeatedly churned in the rumor mill as a possible teammate for one of the big academic bidders: Battelle. The company, which declined to comment for this story, runs the Oak Ridge and Idaho national laboratories for DOE.
Bids on the next LANL management and operations contract are due Dec. 11.
