Forest Service turns down employee outsourcing appeal

The Forest Service late Wednesday ruled against California mechanics appealing an agency decision to outsource fleet maintenance work.

In the ruling, Forest Service officials said the mechanics should not have waited so long to challenge the accuracy of a statement describing work at stake in a competition for 60 full-time maintenance jobs. The agency ran the competition under guidelines in the Office of Management and Budget's May 2003 revised version of Circular A-76, the rule book for competitive sourcing.

The Federal Acquisition Regulation asks federal employees to lodge complaints about gaps or flaws in descriptions of work designated for competition, called performance work statements, before agencies finish gathering proposals from interested contractors. In this case, the fleet maintenance workers should have raised an objection by Oct. 5, 2003, the closing date listed on the Forest Service's request for proposals, agency officials ruled.

"Contests raising [allegations of errors in the performance work statement] that are received after the closing date for receipt of proposals are considered to be untimely," according to the March 24 agency ruling, signed by Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, Contracting Officer Doug Lee and Director of Acquisition Management Dale Fabian.

The mechanics' complaints, first formally articulated in a January appeal filed by William Van Auken, also lacked merit, the Forest Service officials said. Van Auken, elected to represent his fellow mechanics, later transferred the case to Dan Duefrene, head of the National Federation of Federal Employees' local representing the fleet maintenance workers. To gain legal standing at the Forest Service, Duefrene pursued the case as an interested individual, rather than in his capacity as a union official.

In the appeal, Duefrene asked the Forest Service to reconsider an early January decision to award the $27 million fleet maintenance contract to Serco Management Services Inc., a New Jersey affiliate of the U.K.-based Serco Group PLC. That decision affected 59 full-time and about 30 part-time Forest Service mechanics. Some may be able to work for Serco, while the Forest Service will retain others to help administer the contract.

The Forest Service made procedural mistakes in running the competition, and lacks a comprehensive picture of the actual work at stake, Duefrene argued. Mechanics in California help with myriad firefighting duties, he said, many of which are not included in Serco's contract.

Such problems resulted in a flawed performance work statement, Van Auken and Duefrene argued.

But in Wednesday's ruling, the Forest Service said the "record clearly demonstrates that the performance work statement was neither ambiguous nor incomplete." A team led by a Forest Service equipment manager "went to great efforts to assure that the information in the RFP was complete and accurate," the decision noted.

Duefrene said he is disappointed in the ruling and will file a protest with the General Accounting Office within 10 days. But he is not guaranteed a hearing. GAO is in the process of deciding whether employees or union representatives have the right to challenge the results of public-private competitions run using OMB's May 2003 guidelines.

Historically, GAO has not accepted job competition protests from federal employees or unions, but the watchdog agency is reconsidering this policy in light of questions raised by OMB's reworked Circular A-76.

Lawyers representing Serco, the contractor winning the competition, were not formally involved in the agency-level appeal, though they sent comments to the Forest Service. They will likely participate in the GAO protest.