Tyndall Air Force Base Hurricane Michael Recovery Industry Day #3: Construction Execution Strategy Update/Tyndall Rebuild and Construction Strategy Q&A
Briefed by: Brigadier General Patrice Melancon, Executive Director, Tyndall Program Management Office; Col. Lori Walden, Director, Tyndall Program Management Office; and Mr. Tom Brown, AFCEC Chief CONUS Military Construction
Industry Day is a collaborative effort where senior military and business leaders come together to discuss innovations and the future of Tyndall Air Force Base and the impact to the community. We realize there is no better way to rebuild Tyndall AFB without a partnership that includes both the local community and Industry. This is our third Industry Day in what we hope will be a series of exchanges to help identify innovative ways to move forward as we rebuild Tyndall together. On behalf of the Air Force we are pleased that you have taken time away from your busy schedules to assist us with the rebuild at one of the Air Force’s most important bases in its inventory.
Industry Day was held at Florida State University – Panama City’s Holley Academic Center, Panama City, Florida
Transcript
At this time, I’d like to invite General Patrice Melancon back to the stage once again. General Melancon serves as the Executive Director of the Tyndall Program Management Office. She truly is the engineer leading the way for Tyndall to become the 21st Century Air Force base of the future. General Melancon will be briefing the Construction Execution Strategy Update, along with Mr. Tom Brown from the Air Force Civil Engineer, Chief of CONUS Military Construction. Try to fit that on a business card. General Melancon, please, come to the podium. Please welcome her once again. (audience applauds)
Good morning. So, I’m gonna… As Don said, I’m General Patrice Melancon. I have Mr. Tom Brown with me. He is the Air Force Civil Engineer Center Chief of CONUS MILCON, so he really is leading that piece of the program, and we are working very closely, in concert with each other, as we execute this program. Whoop, wrong way. So I’m gonna cover the program scope, and then turn it over to Mr. Brown to walk through the MILCON Execution Strategy. I’ll then discuss a little bit about our O&M, or FSRM efforts, and then Tom’s gonna wrap up with Risk and Mitigation and Near-term Actions. And then, finally, I’ll give a little bit of a primer to the transition to our Construction Logistics Panel Discussions that will happen later. So, the Tyndall Reconstruction Program is going to involve, as we’ve said, both MILCON, as well as O&M funding. The MILCON bill is estimated at three billion dollars and consists of 42 projects being executed across 12 construction zones, which includes that FY18 Fire Crash Rescue Station Project that was impacted by Hurricane Michael. As you’re gonna see on Tom’s slides, three of the MILCON projects do have phasing options. That was driven largely by the funding flow. Ideally, we would award those projects as a single MILCON, but we do need to keep that flexibility to deal with the reality of the funding environment. The MILCON Program has been evolving over time as we’ve fleshed out requirements with mission owners and end users, and as you can expect, changing requirements along with the influences of all the factors that will influence costs, have driven a maturing of the project programming process. Some of the factors which are influencing the program estimates include those shown on the slide. Clearly, as we’ve discussed, there’s a lot of construction that’s happening all at the same time. We have had to think about climactic resiliency with designed flood elevations and wind speeds. We wanna be sure that we’re building sustainability in and with a 21st Century digitally-integrated base comes a cybersecurity concern, so we’ve obviously gotta pay attention to that. And then we are really looking to use technology that’s available today. So all those things have influenced the cost estimates and what we are anticipating for pricing that we’re gonna get. In addition to the MILCON funding, two of the FY19 projects were authorized under Section 2854 authority. That allows us to use O&M money for MILCON projects. Those are the Air Battle Manager Simulator and Fire Station Number Two. And finally, there is a sizable O&M bill associated with the reconstruction effort, focused largely on repair. In total, we estimate over 300 million. Right now, we’ve got about 290 million of that that was funded in FY19 with the Supplemental. Our strategy was to execute as much of that O&M as we could this FY, but in reality, some of that’s gonna get deferred to FY20. We worked very closely with our Tyndall Wing partners and mission owners to determine which O&M requirements could be slipped to FY20, based upon mission priorities. So I’m gonna transition over now to Mr. Tom Brown, who’s gonna walk through the planned MILCON program.
Which one’s which?
Right is forward.
Okay. It does fit on the business card. It’s good to be back. Thank you all for coming today. Thank you, Colonel Laidlaw, for hosting, and let’s talk MILCON. A little bit of this is repetitive. I’m sure a lot of people in the room have been to the other two Industry Days, so we’ll kind of blitz through these. I wanna make sure that the General and I leave enough time for Q and A ’cause I think you’re probably all gonna have a lot of questions. But the way this was established, essentially, two PMO Directors ago from Colonel Scott Matthews, who’s here in the room, and you can pester him with why he decided to do this. What we wanted to do early on was say, “Okay, let’s, if we’re gonna have to rebuild this Air base, “let’s do this in a way that’s simple “and doesn’t require us to do 150 different contract actions “and 150 different design reviews, “et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. “Let’s carve this base up into sectors, “and let’s award large contracts by sector “so that the major construction companies “that can take this level work on “are able to do it effectively.” So the base is broken up into 12 zones. Each zone, and the envision is that zone’s gonna be awarded to a single design-build contractor. Each zone’s gonna have multiple facilities, from one to 15 plus, and that design-build contractor is gonna be responsible for sorta self-de-conflicting within that zone. So anything from haul route to lay-down site to security access, all that’s done by a single contractor, not the five or 10 or 15 getting in each other’s way in the zones. So that’s why we decided to do this. The zones were carved out sort of based on the way the base was mapped out and the way most Air Force bases are laid out, which is there’s sort of community sectors. There’s mission, there’s the flightline and everything surrounding it. There’s a community Area. So each of the 12 zones has essentially a unique geography, to some extent. Two of the zones have the geography of the entire base, essentially, but largely, they’re broken down by function and geography, not necessarily by facility type. The bottom bullet here, and in the interest of full disclosure, we want to be as candid and as open with you, the supporting population, as we can. One of the things that we discovered early on, and if you look at scope of our program, the typical MILCON year for the Air Force is about a billion and a half dollars worth of MILCON projects executed across Planet Earth. Tyndall is a three billion dollar pop-up, which is twice our annual total MILCON program. So it’s a lot to take on. We were only ever staffed to manage, sort of, the workload that we have, so we’ve got a surge of work to be done here. So not only do we need help from the Design and Construction industry, we need support from the Advisory and Assistance Services and the A&E Community to helps us kind of tackle this level of work. So we did get Planning and Design funds in 19. We got a lot of them, and we’re gonna get a lot of them again in 20. We’re about ready to award contracts for all 12 zones to do the 35% Design-Build RFP packages, using the A&E Community that is, in many cases, maybe in all cases, represented here in the room. Those contracts were set up through the Mobile and Savannah districts. I know Tab Brown is here, and Tab, many thanks to you for helping set that up. The construction contracts, the Acquisition Plan has not yet been finalized, so is it going to be a C Contract, one contract, one contractor for the duration of work in that zone? Is it gonna be a SATOC? Is it gonna be a MATOC, where we’ll have two or three contractors competing for task orders within the zone? We have not yet resolved that. We’re gonna work that out through the Corps. By the way, while I’ve kind of recognized Tab, I wanna again recognize the South Atlantic Division of the Corps of Engineers and the Mobile and Savannah districts, in particular. One thing I’d like everybody to walk away from this morning is there’s been a lot of talk about “Well, are we really gonna rebuild Tyndall?” Yeah, we are. But we also, in the Air Force, somewhat struggle to execute the program that we had, that billion and a half dollars, because it’s just a lot of work, and there’s a lot of nuance and subtleties to how we execute our program. One take-away that, again, let’s all walk away from. We’re postured to award the first two MILCON scope contracts here at Tyndall by the end of this month, less than one year from when the storm hit. That’s a phenomenal achievement, (audience applauds) and that’s really a tribute to the South Atlantic Division of the Corps and our team, helping put together those packages for award, and Colonel Matthews’, frankly, vision to get started on this seven months ago or so. Okay. So for the Small Business Team, this is… It would be counter-intuitive to say, “How are you going to award “multi-hundred million dollar contracts per zone, “and is small business gonna get a bite?” That’s a factor we considered early on and we’re gonna continue to consider. A couple things related to that. Most of the FSRM work that’s gonna be done here at Tyndall is perfectly well-suited to that community, so in very, very simple terms, the major MILCON work is likely to be done by large design-build firms. The smaller work, the FSRM work, is largely gonna be done looking at a small business community for execution support there. There may be some MILCON zones, there’s a couple that may lend themselves to small business, so if the MILCON projects scope is sized appropriately for that zone, then we’ll look at, again, through the Corps and the Acquisition team at the Corps, looking for small business prime contractors to bid those kinda small to mid-range contracts. So you can see on the bullets here, the game plan, if I can kinda leave you with just a take-away, we’re sensitive to the needs of small business. We think by the time Tyndall is fully rebuilt and we cut the ribbon on the last facility, everybody, large and small, in the Panama City and extended contractor community will have had their chance to do some work here. So, first up, we’re getting funded in increments by the Congress. One other note. I wanna recognize another individual. He doesn’t know I’m gonna do this, but Lieutenant Colonel Mike Askrigan, here in the third row here, went with me and a few others from the Pentagon and briefed the Congress on what the game plan was ’cause Congress is interested and they wanna know what’s going on at Tyndall today. And Mike, having rode out the storm with Colonel Laidlaw, and articulated very, very well to the Congress how we’re currently meeting our mission needs in facilities that are significantly degraded, and why we need the current and future support of Congress. And I think here in the Panama City community, if you wanna stop and say thank you and buy Mike a beer, he did a lot of… He’s, maybe more than any other person in the room that day, kinda swung the argument in favor of, “Hey, we really need your help,” and Congress was receptive to that. So first wave of funds is gonna be focused on getting that first F-35 in hangar with a crew of folks that are gonna be able to fly it and maintain it. Following that, the Support District, you can see there, Admin and WR, Community Commons, those are all gonna follow. The Silver Flag site and the AFRL site, it’s gonna be a large contract. The installation-wide infrastructure requirement, so what that is essentially is taking the electrical, water, waste water, gas, and communications lines that are in the base, and they’re currently sort of, as most Air Force bases are, kinda spider-webbed around the Installation to provide a more cogent, cohesive utility corridor distributed network. So we’re gonna do that. That’s a fairly large construction effort that’s gonna be done, more than likely, in concert with the owner of that utility, who is not the U.S. Air Force. It’s the privatized utility contractor. So that’s gonna provide a little bit of a challenge for us in how we execute that ’cause that’s a little outside our norm. And again, those two projects there on the bottom, those are the two which we should be awarding by the end of this month. The ABM Sim project and Fire Station Two. So just taking a look here, this is the zones north of 98. You can just take a look at this is how they’re broken out. Ideally, what we would like to do when we’re in construction, this Industry Day is a lot about how we’re gonna get after this from a logistical perspective. There was one slide we had in here, we took it out, but I guess what it does, sort of, up there, if you take a look at that upper left-hand corner of this slide, just to the left vertical column on the red box, is the bridge. (woman speaks quietly) I’m sorry, do I have…
[Woman] It’s on the red.
[Tom] Yeah, so right there. That’s a logistical choke point, right? So everything that’s gonna be brought on base, to Tyndall, to build out this installation of the future, is gonna come down that narrow passageway. And for many of you who drive that often, and for those of us who drive it sporadically, it can already kind of jam up, and it’s just gonna get, it’s gonna pose a challenge. Now, how we tackle that, we’re interested in industry’s ideas. Anything innovative, to help ameliorate that condition is a welcome concept. So this is, if you take a look at these slides, I’m gonna zip through these, but if you take a look at the award days, we’re front-loading a lot of the F-35 or Fifth Generation Fighter Support fourth quarter of FY20 awards, so that’s obviously the last three months of the fiscal year. So about a year from now, we’re gonna award a lot of these projects. The ones that are first quarter FY21 are gonna follow with the next wave of funding that we’re gonna get from Congress. So those are dates that you kinda wanna key on, both on the F-35 side and then on the south of Highway 98 side, as well. So Airfield Op Zone follows, and then MSA, the Munitions Storage Area, is first quarter 21. And then the WEG projects are all waiting on funding from the Congress, which will likely come in FY21, or possibly 22. So, south of 98, here are the other zones. What we’re looking for, again, from a logistics perspective, is can we create construction-free zones for each of these zones once we award the contract. And maybe ask the contractor community to carve out some fencing that’s temporary, maybe some temporary road networks that allow contractors in and out without having to perturb base operations while they’re getting after the construction effort. And again, this next wave of projects is sort of the south side of 98. The CDC’s early on. These slides will be available to you. This just gives you a flavor of kind of each zone, the sectoring, where it fits in the fiscal year. Early on, again, we’re gonna do the F-35 work, the CDC, the site development and infrastructure work. Hot on the heels of that is gonna be the next wave of F-35 and some more infrastructure work. What we grapple with, again, truth in advertising, the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, requires us to do, in this case, in Tyndall’s case, parallel actions, an Environmental Assessment for, essentially, replacing what was there, and then a Environmental Impact Statement for making, sort of following through, on the decision the Air Force made, to say, “Okay, let’s switch this 5th Gen Fighter base “from an F-22 base to F-35 base.” So the Record of Decision for those projects is not gonna be signed until probably January of ’21, maybe February.
[General Melancon] No, January. January. (woman laughs) January ’21.
[Tom] The General. She’s got the “I Want” finger, and it works. (audience laughs) Yeah. So, January ’21, we’re gonna get Record of Decision to bed down the F-35s here. We can’t turn dirt here until after that decision is made. However, we’re gonna sort of, as Colonel Hyden, the former PMO Director, said, we’re gonna award contracts prior to that with design at risk. They’re design-build contracts, so that contractor will be awarded that contract prior to the RoD, but only do the design work associated with the first shovel to be stuck in the ground, which will happen after January ’21. Okay, ma’am, back to you.
All right, so we talked about the facility, FSRM, Facility, Sustainment, Restoration, Modernization. The O&M piece of this, as I mentioned, we’re estimating over 300 million. And honestly, that estimate continues to evolve, but that’s what we’re looking at right now. We’ve got about 290 million that we received in FY19, and the rest of it will be executed in FY20. But this just shows the break out of what we’ve got. We have a very large amount that’s currently in Solicitation. We do have some that’s already been awarded. That’s very good, so we’re gettin’ projects started. We do have some that are still in Package Development or Pre-Solicitation, but we’re gettin’ after this, and we’ve gotta start movin’ them forward. I’m gonna run through this next number of slides. Again, these’ll be available for you, but I just wanted to give you a flavor of what’s happening. There will be the 325th CONS, a local CON Squadron, will be executing quite a number of these. This is the first one. Whoops. You’ll see these already awarded here, and then we move into those that are in Solicitation. Again, more with the 325th CONS, some of them still in Pre-Solicitation or Package Development, and then a couple that are deferred to FY20 because of the funding. Next slide. This is to through Corps of Engineers. Not only are they helping us with MILCON, but they also are helping us with execution of DFSRM, and these are all through the Mobile district. Again, one that’s been awarded, a lot of them in Solicitation, and there’s a variety of kinds of projects here, all of them, really, repair. Again, more with the Corps of Engineers, those that are in Solicitation, and then the ones that had been to deferred to FY20 because of the funding. And then, finally, these are a few kinda cats and dogs that are being awarded, some of them, through the 772nd Enterprise Sourcing Squadron. We mentioned the NEPA Environmental Assessment. That has been awarded. We’ve already gotten started on that. And the Programmatic EIS, that will be awarded, I’m told, by the end of this week. And then we’ve got some energy assessments, and then DLA is involved in some of those where we’re trying to get all of the electrical lines from overhead to underground. Looking at resiliency, that will be a big step for us. And then Fish and Wildlife has awarded… Obviously, as you guys drive around, you see all trees that are down, so they did help us out with awarding that contract. All right, I’m gonna turn it back over to Tom. He’s gonna walk you through some of the risks that we’ve been talking about and potential mitigation that we’ve been discussing.
Thank you. So what this is, this is a slide that wasn’t initially made for this session, but we’re sharing it, again, in the interest of openness and full disclosure. We briefed this up to our Air Force leadership who wanna know, “Hey, are you guys gonna be able to do this?” That was the sort of question we got, and we said, “Well, there’s some risks,” right? One of the risks is, with all of our MILCON projects, you know, nobody here at Tyndall was thinking, “I’m gonna have to replace my AMU hangar,” so when you actually have to do that, you’ve gotta think through, “Well, king for a day, “what do we actually need? “What are the Air Force requirements? “How would we adapt it to meet today’s requirements?” And so those requirements evolve on the projects, but at some point, you have to stick a fork in it and say, “Okay, this is what it is. “Let’s move forward and get this thing awarded.” But those requirements, because they came at Tyndall all at once, in bulk, we have to take a look at those, and kind of aggressively get after what the true requirement is to rebuild Tyndall, ink it, give it to Congress, get the money, give it to the Corps, get the projects under contract. So it’s a challenge. Staffing, I mentioned before, we were only ever staffed to handle about a billion and a half dollars a year worth of MILCON in the Air Force, and now we’ve sorta doubled-slash-tripled that. We’re not gonna get any more manpower, so what we’re gonna have to do is go to the contract community, get the A&AS Advisory and the Citizens’ Services contracts to sort of augment our staff. So we’ll be awarding those contracts soon. We’re nearing a contract award on the first wave of A&S support, both for our staff and Colonel Walden’s staff and the PMO, and that’s gonna be important. Competition for skilled labor, a study’s been done that says, “Okay, today, at any given day in the Panama City catch basin, for a construction industry, there’s about 500 or so skilled craft labor folks employed to do this business. At the high water mark of Tyndall’s rebuild, the need is gonna be somewhere around 1800, so that’s gonna be a challenge, and we’re gonna have to address that. We adjusted the price on our contracts a little bit, on our programmed amounts, to accommodate what we expect to be surge of labor force. Again, what this day is gonna do is we’re gonna receive a lot of inputs from speakers that’ll say, “Here’s how we might do that “that might kind of save costs “and efficiently operate, execute the game plans.” Getting the Corps to award contracts in a timely fashion’s gonna be a challenge, but Tab said he’s gonna do it, so we’re holding him to that. One of the challenges we have as an air force is, you know, Congress only provided, for the first wave, about half a billion dollars for the work for a three billion dollar requirement, right? Part of that is because Nebraska got hit with a flood sort of within the last year, and the Congress said, “Well, we gotta do that, too, right?” And we said, “Yeah, we do.” So Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska is getting some money assigned which was part of that FY19 storm bill, which might otherwise all have come to Tyndall. Just a political reality. NEPA, we talked about. That’s a concern, and I talked about how we’re gonna do that. How we do infrastructure, the infrastructure zones, where we have money from Congress assigned to do that, where we have a privatized utility contract who actually owns the asset, we don’t own it as an Air Force, how we’re gonna do that, we’ll work it out, and we’re already starting the conversations and we’ve got partners willing to be part of the solution, and so I think we’re gonna get there from here. And then finally, the Zone Interdependencies, right? For 12 zones, 12 prime contractors, you know, the sort of notion is, “Hey, my project has me spillin’ water into this guy’s site, “and he’s got his spilling water into my site.” So what we need to do is make sure that we have somebody sort of stepping above the fray, the 13th zone, as I think of it, to sort of work all the design at the seams and make sure that each design adapts along the way, on the fly. So we’re gonna kinda be riding this bike while we’re building it for the next three to five years, and we need some help to do that, and we’re gonna contract for that help by the end of this month. Staffing? We’re filling positions. This is a non-paid advertisement, but if you’re an Engineer and you wanna be a Project Manager and work for AFCEC and be on the Air Force side of this equation, we are hiring. (audience laughs) So give me your business card with maybe not so many words on it, and we’ll call you back. For real. We’re gonna staff up. We’re gonna award the A&S contract by the end of this month. We’re gonna award the Design Integration contract by the end of November. And as I said, we’ve already awarded the first, or we’re about to award. We haven’t yet, but we have high confidence we’re gonna award both of those projects before the end of the month. We’re gonna award the design-build RoP contracts between now and October, and then we’re gonna start design charetting right away. So, as Dave Kovec, who’s on my team, and I are kinda wrestling with, there’s gonna be a design charette sort of every week, from the first week of October through ’til Christmas. So we’re gonna be busy doing the design work and that’s gonna be underway very shortly. One of the other issues that we have, and I know my time is about up, but who has the authority to say yes or no? Who coordinates? Who does dig permits? Who does fence lines? Who establishes haul routes? We are hand-in-glove with the PMO here, and I’m really glad Travis Slayton’s here on the team to take over from Lori Walden. She’s done an amazing job. Again, maybe the third personal recognition, Lori Walden, everybody here, say a huge thank you. She’s a phenomenal talent, and she has kept this program on track. So, Lori, I wanna say thanks to that. But yeah, the governance is gonna be an issue, which we’re working through. And then, the Construction Logistics Strategy, that’s what we’re here for, right? How do you deal with the 98 fence? How do you deal with 98 gettin’ ripped up from just tons of 18-wheelers hauling material back and forth on the roads all the time? How do we continue to recycle the conditioning of that road? When do we deliver assets to the site? Maybe we’ll kinda work with the contractors who win the design-build contracts to say maybe you’ll deliver your materials to the site during the evening hours so you don’t perturb the traffic of the Airmen coming to work to do the mission of the base. So we’re open to that. What I would say is, we, the Air Force Civil Engineer Team, are not going to dictate how, for the most part, how the contractors house their work force, how they feed their work force, but we may end up working, and we’re certainly gonna work in partnership with them on how they get stuff to their site, how they conveniently get things in and out, and that’s gonna be a multi-pronged partnership between Colonel Laidlaw and his staff on how to secure the Installation while we’re doing this construction work in a way that streamlines both missions, the mission of generating air power and the mission of building this Air Force base back. So that’s a challenge. Everybody knows it. We’re just gonna continue to work through it.
[General Melancon] Put the other slide up.
Ah, there we go. The General’s right. So all those things.
[General Melancon] Just really… Is this on?
I don’t know.
Again, you know, we just really want this to be a dialog. We’re hopefully gonna generate some conversations and some thoughts today, but really, like I said before, just keep an open mind. And I think, Don, I think we have time for a few questions with this segment. I’ll let you run that.
Colonel Walden, would you mind coming up and participating in the panel? Thank you, General Melancon and Mr. Brown. At this time, we’ll open it up for a Question and Answer session on the Tyndall Rebuild and Construction Strategy. We’ll open the floor to questions, and we ask that, when you do come up to the microphone, that you state your name and your company, followed by one question. There’s a mic located in the center of the room here, and we have two of our Lieutenants, who are roaming around. Please raise your hand. Thank you. Roaming around, working each side of the room, so just raise your hand. They’ll bring the microphone to you. Again, only one question per company at a time. The floor is now open. Sir.
[David] Hi, my name is David Voye and I’m with Center Electric. How are you? Have you considered, I know we’ve had some of these conversations, how to integrate the FRCS across the base, technologies, micro-grids, renewable energy, into these 12 zones, such that you are delivered a wholistic system that works at the end, instead of disparate systems that are maybe working, but maybe not. How do you integrate that? Have you given thoughts to that?
I guess I’ll take that. Although the General has… The General and I talk about this all the time. So yes, we have certainly considered it. The Air Force has an issue, a topic, that’s very much concerned with this, with Category Management. You know, there’s categories of things on an Air Force base to include Industrial Control Systems. We, I think, just got the green light to standardize the HVAC systems across the entire installation. Typically, in the past, we’ve awarded a construction contract to a contractor and said, “Okay, for your Industrial Control Systems, “put in whatever you wanna put in, “and just make sure there’s a sync-up “with our Energy Management Control System,” which is typically in the Civil Engineer Squadron. So we’ve been given the green light to pick a winner, so to speak, and say, “Okay, every building “that’s gonna be built on this installation “will have a HVAC system that looks like this,” so we’re looking to expand that to include industrial control systems so that we can, essentially, do some market research, find the best candidate, so then we can sorta templatize this and issue it in the design guide specs that we issue to all the zone-winning contractors. We’re early stages of that, but yes, we have considered that, and our intent is to do it, as long as the Air Force Acquisition Community gives us the green light to do so.
[Dave] Thank you.
[Lieutenant] We have a question over here.
[Rick] Good morning. Rick Sloup, with Floore-Gubner Group. Thanks for the brief. You guys pointed out some risks and mitigations that you’ve brought up, and I think one of the biggest issues that we, as the contracting community see is that we have some risk mitigations that we have to think about. How’s your execution plan gonna take some of these undefinable quantities and issues and put it out in a solicitation, as far as it goes towards a contract type and contract, and how you’re gonna evaluate those bids, and evaluate those bids?
[Tom] Rick, could you just flesh that out a little further?
[Rick] Is this gonna be fixed price? Is it gonna be cost reimbursable? Is it going to be, how’s that contract solicitation gonna look when it comes out on the street?
Very good question. I guess I would go back to we’re looking at it. That’s a decision we’re gonna have to work in concert with the Corps. The acquisition strategy includes that concept. I mentioned that, you know, is gonna be C Contracts, SATOCs or MATOCs. It’s also gonna include is it gonna be Fixed Price, Best Value, Not to Exceeds. We haven’t yet worked that out, but we’re going to. So it should be, our intent, is that when we issue a solicitation to the design-build contractor community, we’re as crystal clear in our requirements as we can be. And to the extent there’s any kind of opaqueness to that, to have a quick turn on RFIs so that we kinda move forward with an aggressive and quick response. Do you have something?
Yeah.
Does that scratch the itch, Rick?
[Rick] Okay, thank you.
[Don] Over here.
[Lieutenant] Sir, could you please stand and state your name and what company you’re with?
Good morning. My name is Norm Hatch. I’m with Gator Engineering and Aquifer Restoration, Inc. Acronym is GEAR. But my question is, you mentioned that you’re going to…
[Don] Can you check his mic, please? (audience mumbles) (woman instructs Norm) LT, can you give him a hand with the mic?
[Norm] Oh. (laughs loudly)
There ya go.
There ya go.
[Lieutenant] Much better. There you go.
[Norm] Sorry, sorry. I’m sorry about that. My name is Norm Hatch. I’m with Gator Engineering and Aquifer Restoration, Inc. The acronym for that is GEAR, G-E-A-R. But my question is, you mentioned you’re gonna be awarding design-build contracts for the 12 zones. My question is how is that different from the 12 prime contractors that you have for the zones?
All right, good question. The way we’re gonna do this, the 12 contracts we are about to award and we’ve identified, those are all architect-engineer firms who are gonna help us prepare the 35% Design-Build Package, which will then go out in a second solicitation to the design-build contractors. So the first wave of 12 contracts is design contracts. The next wave’s gonna be construction contracts.
[Norm] Okay, next question is who is ultimately responsible in the contractor community for each zone? Is it the prime D-B contractor or is it gonna be the construction contractor?
That’s a really good question. The answer, from our intent, from the MILCON perspective, is that the prime contractor who won that contract for that zone is responsible for construction in that zone. The challenge that we’re gonna face, and how we’re gonna have to work hand-in-glove with Colonel Walden’s folks is, within those zones, and there was a bullet on one of the slides we showed. I shoulda stressed it. There’s probably 10 FSRM projects for every MILCON project we have in the zones, and there’s only one base, right? So those projects all live in the zone, so those FSRM contractors need their own lay-down sites. They need their own haul routes. So to the extent that we can possibly do this, that’s why the PMO and the Design Integration Contractor are gonna be so busy, to sort of work those de-conflicts.
[Norm] Next follow-up question is—
[Don] You know you’re breakin’ all the rules, right? (Norm laughs) One question per…
[Norm] Will the prime contractor, zone contractor, will they have a role in the selection of the construction contractors that are gonna be doin’ the construction in their zone?
Are you askin’ about the design?
[Norm] The design, no, the prime contractors are gonna be doin’ the 35% design, as I understand?
Yeah, so no, they will not have a say in who ultimately gets that construction contract.
[Norm] Then how can you say they’re responsible for everything that happens in their zone?
Yeah, I think you’re getting confused. There’s a design firm that’s gonna do a 35% design and prepare a package that will go out to solicit for the construction. Ultimately, the construction prime is responsible for everything that happens with construction.
[Norm] Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah.
[Don] Thank you. We have a question on this side.
[Lieutenant] Sir, your name and the company you’re with?
[Bernard] Good morning. My name’s Bernard Wright with Kirlin Builders. This may be a question that we may follow up during the construction logistics part, but I know there was some talk about barge access, just to kinda reduce some of the traffic that may come across the bridge. Have you guys had any other future talks about that, and where are you at with it?
So certainly, that’s something that we have looked at and the last session today is gonna be the Rail folks and the Port Authority folks. I have no idea what that might look like, but we certainly think that that’s an option that we need to really explore and see if we can’t figure out a way to do some of this by either rail and or boat, using the waterways.
If I could just go just a half step further on that. If a design-build contractor, as part of his or her proposal, says, “I intend to get materials to my site “from the sea, not from the road, “and that’s gonna be a more efficient way to do that, “and therefore, my price for bidding this contract “is lower than my competitors’ “because they’re gonna be using a pinched haul route “with more time, lag, delays, “labor force costs,” then we’re certainly open to that. If that requires the Air Force, then, to take a positive action on our part, to do the Environmental Assessment, for example, because NEPA’s gonna require, if you double or triple or ten-tuple the amount of traffic coming in from barges, which currently comes in today, for some concrete material and some fuel, if you’re gonna jack that up by a lot, you’re gonna have to consider what the environmental impacts are gonna be. So that could, it’s possible that would delay the execution of that, and we’d have to take that under consideration. But we’re certainly open to it because again, that narrow bridge is, it’s a pretty pronounced pinch-point. But we haven’t made a decision one way or the other, but what we’re not gonna do is dictate that. We’ll be open to the suggestion, and if it’s a better way to do it, we’re all for it.
[Don] We have time for one more question. And we can get your question later on.
[Anne] Good morning. Anne Clayton, from Clayton Company Consultants. We’re design-builders. Question is, the set-aside percentages, is there any particular set-aside for like, 8(a), or minority, or woman-owned companies?
[General Melancon] I don’t know.
[Tom] I’m gonna answer that by looking down to my right, and Mr. Brown here, from the South Atlantic Division of the Corps, is nodding his head, saying, “Yeah, there’s gonna be some of that.” We don’t know exactly to what extent, but that’s a consideration that’s always taken by the Acquisition folks at the Corps. So there will be something, and as I said earlier, we’re gonna work in partnership with the South Atlantic Division. Part of the challenge of the Small Business Set-Aside Program is the immensity of the Tyndall rebuild, and the time compression to execute the immensity of that rebuild makes it more of a challenge to carve out the set-asides. But we’re gonna do everything we can to make sure everybody’s equities are addressed.
[Don] And I think we can probably squeeze in just one more. I know there was a fellow back there who wanted—
Yeah, there was a fellow, yeah, back.
Yeah, mm-hm.
Hi, good morning. John Peabody with Lott-McDonald. My question is, you referred to climactic resiliency, so what is the design standard to achieve that? I’m thinking to the post-Katrina experience that the Corps went through, and the hurricane modeling that they did to achieve a design standard for that. I’m assuming you’re going to do something similar.
We’ve already looked at the design flood elevation, and we have a memo that was issued by the Air Staff that sets those design flood elevations, and that did look at historic rainfall, as well as climate change data, to look at what we think is gonna happen with sea level rise. So that’s been set, and we’re currently wrapping up evaluation of the wind speeds and structural considerations. And that will come out, and that will be published in the Installation Facility Standards when that gets put together.
[John] So that did not follow a multi-path hurricane and multi-strength hurricane simulation, like the Corps did for New Orleans?
I don’t know the details of what the analysis was, but we did look at modeling. In fact, as I understand it, we worked with the ASCE Modelers. They’re the group that sets those kinds of standards. So we’ve tried to look at the latest and greatest data available.
[Don] Does that answer your question? Thank you very much for your questions.