We persuaded the agency to amend the solicitation to both reduce to risk to bidders and obtain more accurate bids.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a solicitation for the replacement of two generators with a new steam turbine generator and auxiliary systems. The solicitation required the contractor to prepare a demolition plan that identified all impacted utilities and controls, any outages necessary to complete the work, and temporary utilities to allow the facility to continue operations during the project. However, bidders had no way to know how many circuits would be affected by demolition, what systems they controlled, whether they needed to be bypassed, or what outages would be necessary to complete the work. Because the contractor needed to coordinate outages up to three months in advance, a single unplanned outage was likely to make timely completion impossible.
We submitted an agency-level protest, arguing that the solicitation improperly required bidders to assume the full risk of conditions they had no way to ascertain prior to award. Offerors could only mitigate that risk by including a large contingency in their bids. We advocated that the contracting officer instead amend the solicitation to instruct offerors to assume a certain number of circuits and no outages for bidding purposes, add a separate CLIN for the demolition plan that included investigation of the electrical system, and provide for a contract adjustment based on the difference between the actual work disclosed by the approved demolition plan and the baseline assumptions given to offerors. We explained that this solution was a win-win because it reduced the risk to bidders but also gave the government the benefit of more accurate bidding. The contracting officer adopted our proposed amendment, mitigating the risk to our client.
