Jan 5, 2012 

By John Fleck

From the Albuquerque Journal

Federal officials this week awarded a Bechtel-University of California team $83.7 million for its management of Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2011, plus a one-year extension of its lab management contract as a bonus, but refused to release the performance evaluation report on which the decisions were based.

The one-year extension means the current team will be in charge at Los Alamos through 2017.

“The award is a tribute to our employees’ dedication to delivering on our commitments,” lab director Charlie McMillan said in a statement. “2011 was an outstanding year for science and mission execution at the Laboratory.”

Refusal to make public the Los Alamos “Performance Evaluation Report” and a similar report evaluating Lockheed Martin’s performance managing Sandia National Laboratories, which the Journal has been requesting for more than a month, continues an agency practice that has drawn criticism from watchdogs who say the information is vital to understanding whether the agency is being a responsible steward of taxpayer dollars.

“It has to do with transparency and accountability,” said Scott Kovac of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, an activist group that in the past has had its requests for the documents denied. “We need to be able to hold them accountable and we can’t do that if they’re not transparent.”

The National Nuclear Security Administration in the past has refused to release the documents to the Journal under the federal Freedom of Information Act. The agency has not yet responded to the most recent formal FOIA requests, filed in February 2010, for the 2008-2010 performance reviews for Sandia and Los Alamos.

The Los Alamos formal fee award document was approved Dec. 20, and the decision was made public via a brief news release on the lab website Tuesday. National Nuclear Security Administration spokeswoman Toni Chiri said the evaluation report on which the fee award was based “is still in process and can’t be released at this time.”

Chiri said the award decision was communicated to the lab in a letter but refused to release the letter.

The question of how contracts at the multibillion dollar federal laboratories are managed, and the fees paid to contractors, are a central question as the National Nuclear Security Administration begins the process of putting Sandia’s contract out for bid.

One key issue is the size of the award fee paid to the private companies that manage the lab, and how their performance in earning that fee is judged. Lockheed Martin’s management fee of $27 million last year was far less than the $83.7 million paid to Bechtel and its partners to manage Los Alamos.

In a March 2010 letter refusing to release the performance evaluations to the Journal, the NNSA said the information was sensitive because it was used to determine future contract awards. The Department of Energy’s Office of Hearings and Appeals overruled that argument in January 2011 but the agency has continued to refuse to release the labs’ performance evaluations.

— This article appeared on page C1 of the Albuquerque Journal