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LANL Bid Schedule University of California
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UC's contract to manage Los Alamos National Lab expires September 30, 2005. DOE's competition schedule has thus far been set up so that in the event of UC losing the contract, the winning university, firm, or consortium will effectively move into place by September of 2005. DOE has urged the UC to compete for LANL's contract, perhaps in partnership with an industrial firm. UC's contract to manage LLNL also expires on September 30, 2005, and the DOE's Blue Ribbon Panel on Lab Contracts has urged that LLNL's contract also be put up for competitive bidding. As UC President Dynes notes, however, "DOE has not yet decided on a competition schedule for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory." Because of this it is highly unlikely that LLNL will be bid out in time for its 2005 expiration, so a contract extension between UC and DOE will be very likely. Requests for Proposals are expected to be released sometime during the summer or fall of 2004, although no timetable has yet been defined by the DOE for the process. On January 15, 2004 the UC Regents approved a measure that gives a kind of fast track negotiating power to UC President Robert Dynes along with John J. Moores, Chairman of the UC Regents, and the Chairman of the Regent's Committee of Laboratory Oversight, Peter Preuss. The powers granted to these three men allow for them to continue negotiating and working with the Department of Energy in expectation that UC will bid. This includes the ability to agree to contract extensions if the DOE offers such and option at any of the labs, to respond to requests by the DOE for an expression of interest and statement of qualifications on behalf of the UC, and the ability to hire professional services to help in drafting bid documents and materials. So far the only contract extension that the UC and DOE have agreed to concerns the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, a DOE owned facility that is a highly improbable object of competitive bidding because of its proximity to UC Berkeley and its embedded relationship to Berkeley's science departments and faculties. This contract extension will run through January 2005. The University of California Office of Laboratory Management believes that the timelines for the UC run DOE nuclear weapons labs will be as follows: Los Alamos National Lab: May 2004 - Expression of Interests/Qualification Lawrence Livermore National Lab June
2005 - Expression
of Interests/Qualification |
