Norman Pattiz, the University of California regent who oversees the institution’s work with Department of Energy nuclear weapons labs, will resign in February, news outlets reported Wednesday.
Pattiz, who has served about 16 years on the Board of Regents, informed board Chairman George Kieffer of his decision in a Dec. 28 letter posted online by the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.
Pattiz was already a lame duck on the board’s National Laboratories Subcommittee. In September, he announced he would step down as the subcommittee’s chair and be replaced by Ellen Tauscher: a former California congresswoman who served as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs in the Barack Obama administration.
“[O]ne of the main reasons I accepted an additional term on the Board was to provide enough time to find a successor at the laboratories and allow for a reasonable transition,” Pattiz wrote in his letter to Kieffer. “The period of transition at the laboratories will end in February, and Regent Ellen Tauscher will assume those duties—I will step away at that time.”
In an interviews with the Los Angeles Times, Pattiz denied he was retiring because of a sexually inappropriate comment he made to a podcaster in 2016.
The Board of Regents’ lab subcommittee makes official recommendations for national laboratory management and is empowered to decide how the university allocates fees it earns for lab management.
The University of California is the lead partner on Los Alamos National Security and Lawrence Livermore National Security: the Energy Department’s prime contractors for the Los Alamos and Livermore national laboratories. Both companies include industry partners Bechtel, BWX Technologies, and AECOM.
In September, Pattiz said the university would seek new corporate partners to bid on the follow-on contract to manage Los Alamos. Competition for that roughly $2-billion-a-year, decade-long deal closed in December. The Department of Energy plans to award the contract in April or May.
Pattiz, the founder of radio giant Westwood One and later of podcast publisher PodcastOne, was appointed to the University of California Board of Regents in 2001 by then-Gov. Gray Davis (D).
