Kentucky-based Swift & Staley has won an $88 million, 22-month contract extension to continue providing infrastructure support services at the Energy Department’s Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky.
The Energy Department announced the contract extension Nov. 29, one day before the initial three-year agreement was scheduled to expire. The new deal keeps the contractor on the job through Sept. 30, 2020. The entire five-year contract is worth about $185 million.
The Paducah-based, employee-owned company will continue to provide the environmental cleanup site, once home to uranium enrichment operations, with a variety of services that include maintenance of buildings, upkeep and repair of grounds and parking lots, janitorial services, records management, cybersecurity, quality control, and training.
The company has about 120 employees at the 3,500-acre property in Western Kentucky.
In addition to the Paducah extension, there has been a significant amount procurement-related activity behind the scenes these days at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, sources said this week.
Two sources said the agency is firming up short-term extensions to existing contracts for providers of technical support services at the Paducah Site in Kentucky, the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, and the Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office (PPPO) headquarters in Lexington, Ky.
The contractors are Professional Project Services (Pro2Serve), RSI EnTech, and Strategic Management Solutions (SMSI).
After initially issuing a $137 million consolidated contract to a Pro2Serve subsidiary in June, DOE withdrew the award after rival bidder SMSI in July filed a bid protest with the Government Accountability Office. The bid protest was dismissed in August after the Energy Department apparently decided to revisit the award.
For now, however, the piecemeal contracts will remain in place.
Finally, two other sources speculated this week the Energy Department might consider redoing a major draft request for proposals for the Central Plateau Cleanup Contract at the Hanford Site in Washington state, which was released in late September.
The procurement is one of the first to feature the “end state” approach being championed by Assistant DOE Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White. This approach seeks to maximize the amount of work contractors can complete in 10 years, in hopes of accelerating program schedules.
Responses to the draft RFP were due in late October. Both sources said the Energy Department has been swamped with comments and questions about the solicitation, to the extent it might be reissued. This is due in part to the complexity of the draft RFP, one said.
In September, DOE issued a one-year extension to the incumbent, a CH2M affiliate. CH2M’s parent company, Jacobs, has said it wants to keep the business, originally a $5.8 billion contract, which began in 2008. The work would include decontamination and demolition of buildings and remediation of waste sites; management of transuranic waste; and preparation of reports on regulatory obligations.
