UPDATE: On January 18th, 2018, Barnard Construction Company, Inc. was awarded a fixed price contract worth over $73 million for Santa Teresa Fence Replacement.
On June 7, 2017 the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), through the Fort Worth District, held a border wall remote-industry day for firms interested in qualifying as sources for “Horizontal Construction Contracts For Southwestern Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements.” After firms are properly qualified and placed on the Prequalified Sources List, they will then receive separate acquisition announcements from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for stand-alone contracts worth up to a total of $1.8 billion for, as the DHS list describes:
a mix of border fence, border wall, border patrol roads, border access roads, border lights, border gates (for access to border monuments, for maintenance, and for Border Patrol operational use), border drainage improvements, levee walls, and other miscellaneous improvements, repairs, and alterations.
This presents a large start to border wall construction which President Trump first envisioned in the FY2018 budget, but it is still constrained by other Congressional mandates on the wall funding for FY2017 and parallel border wall solicitations. As the Prequalification process moves forward, USACE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) provided some valuable insight into how they plan to tackle this new procurement project together.
A section of border wall separates Tijuana, Mexico from the Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector (photo via DOD)
During the Industry Day, the Border Patrol Air and Marine Project Management Office (BPAM-PMO) and the USACE Border Infrastructure Project Management Office (BI-PMO, only recently created and specifically for this huge undertaking), emphasized the cooperation of the two agencies in building “Tactical Infrastructure,” dating back to the 654 miles of border fencing first implemented in support of the Secure Fence Act of 2006. With the cooperation of these program offices, CBP and USACE will first form a list of prequalified sources, which will then receive solicitations for projects each worth over $100 million, for a potential total of $1.8 billion.
Prequalification for sourcing includes a minimum of 7 requirements, many involving the kind of details expected for any large-scale government construction contract, including:
- Prior contracts in the last 5 years with a “horizontal construction project” worth at least $100 million.
- The ability to adhere to small business contracting regulations.
- The ability to complete 3 construction contracts simultaneously, which requires a construction bonding capability of at least $100 million for each of the 3 contracts.
While the Prequalification Requirements are relatively straightforward, the industry day emphasized the importance of properly responding to the required questionnaire, to ensure that a company and move forward to the “Phase I evaluation” of the Design-Build process. The government will then consider the implementation approaches of the sources during the Phase I evaluation, and the 5 most-qualified firms will be selected as bidders in the Phase II solicitations, which will be conducted through the “Best Value Trade-Off” procurement methodology.
Companies that do not proceed to the Phase II selection will be allowed the opportunity to debrief with the contracting officer, which presents an extremely useful information gathering opportunity that every firm should take advantage of, as we have stressed in the past. This is particularly important due to the fact that there will likely be further opportunities to bid for similar contracts (including the previously mentioned, concurrent wall solicitations from CBP), for a project that could reportedly cost as much as $21.6 billion.
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