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Despite legal complexities, the Forest Service will likely need only a few weeks to rule on two appeals of a recent decision to outsource fleet maintenance work in California, an agency official said Monday.

The appeals, filed separately by William Van Auken, a mechanic based in San Bernardino, Calif., and the National Federation of Federal Employees, which represents fleet maintenance workers, are complicated because they challenge the results of a job competition conducted under the Office of Management and Budget's reworked Circular A-76. At this point, the Forest Service has yet to decide if Van Auken and the union even have legal standing to file agency-level appeals, said Doug Lee, director of acquisition management in the agency's Pacific Southwest region.

May 2003 revisions to Circular A-76 designate two key officials, the formal representative of in-house employees known as the "agency tender official" and an official elected by a majority of employees on an in-house team, as "directly interested parties" for appealing A-76 decisions within an agency.

Van Auken is not an agency tender official, but he filed his appeal as the representative of federal employees with jobs at stake as a result of the fleet maintenance competition. Roughly 40 mechanics signed a petition designating Van Auken to represent them. NFFE also represents the maintenance workers. The Forest Service will have to decide if Van Auken or the union has legal standing, Lee said.

Under the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the Forest Service has 35 days to issue rulings on job competition appeals. The agency likely will have no trouble meeting that deadline, Lee predicted. Within days, the agency will decide whether to hear the cases. If the agency proceeds, officials should only need a few more weeks to rule on the appeals themselves, Lee said.

Van Auken and NFFE want the Forest Service to reconsider an early January decision to award a $27 million fleet maintenance contract to Serco Management Services Inc., a New Jersey affiliate of the United Kingdom-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, Lee said.

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

"We do a lot of things," Van Auken said. "What [the Forest Service] studied was just the actual wrench-turning."

For instance, a mechanic might inspect vehicles headed to fight a wildfire, Van Auken said. Some mechanics also are qualified to provide ground support and other logistics at the scene of a fire. There is a "significant need" to manage firefighting equipment, much of which is provided by local contractors, he explained.

Many aspects of the mechanics' jobs are not well documented, Van Auken said. Over the course of the competition, Forest Service officials asked the fleet maintenance workers for an abundance of data capturing the scope of the work under study. But often, there was no way the mechanics could provide accurate numbers, he said.

"We don't have a system in place to give them a lot of the data that they were asking for," Van Auken said. "A lot of it was just picking a number out of the air." At other times, the Forest Service managers collecting data were confused about what information they needed, he said.

Lee acknowledged that fleet maintenance workers do a lot more than pure mechanics, but said they gradually started taking on extra responsibilities, partly because they did not have enough work to keep them busy. "One of the issues here is they have time to do [other jobs], so they're underutilized in the fleet maintenance area," Lee said.

The in-house team had plenty of opportunities to pull together an accurate description of daily fleet maintenance work, Lee said, and it would not be feasible to write a contract that encompasses all of the tasks taken care of by the mechanics. "If you put something out to compete, you can't just throw in the kitchen sink and everything else," he said.

This is the very reason the jobs should stay in house, Van Auken said. "We take a real personal stake in the equipment," he added. "A contractor is going to look at the work order."

Both Van Auken and NFFE would like the Forest Service to start over on the competition. "If this is done right, then we don't have a problem with it," Van Auken said.

If the Forest Service turns down the appeals, then the challenges could take on national significance. Van Auken and the union plan to initiate protests at the General Accounting Office, forcing precedents on whether the watchdog agency's bid protest office will hear cases filed by employee team representatives or unions.

Van Auken already filed an appeal at GAO, but GAO dismissed the case last week for procedural reasons, without addressing the issue of legal standing. He reserves the right to initiate a new case should he lose his Forest Service appeal.

COMMENTS

• I have worked for the Forest Service for 29 years as a mechanic, the last 13 as Lead Mechanic/Shop Foreman. “Extra responsibilities” have always been part of the job since I started on the Deschutes Nat. Forest in Region 6, not because we did not have enough work, but because it has always been expected as employees of the Forest Service to do “other work as assigned” its part of the Forest Service culture. Between maintaining over 170 Fleet vehicle dispersed over six counties with travel times up to five hours one way, being on call 24 hour a day seven days a week, completing annual inspections all fleet vehicles every year, fire assignments lasting 14 to 21 days with 16 hour days, plus the need to keep current of new technology. We have never had to worry about “keeping busy”. I am not complaining, I think I can speak for most of the mechanics in that for the most part I love my job. Duncan Chamberlin Posted February 10, 2004 9:18 PM
• As a participating member of the PWS team that produced the Fleet Maintenance workload I take exception to Mr. Lee's comment "The in-house team had plenty of opportunities to pull together an accurate description of daily fleet maintenance work." This comment is grossly inaccurate. The fact is the team did not have adequate time to produce the document, the team did not respond to nor provide clarity to data collection questions from the effected work force and/or managers expected to provide responses nor did the team follow-up when it was discovered several units left out substantial workloads due to not understanding the data call questions. The integrity of the document was jeopardized to meet higher level study completion dates. Deborah Rae DeMars Posted February 10, 2004 3:58 PM
• I would like to know where Doug Lee got his facts on why mechanics had extra duties? I supervise 8.5 mechanics that were studied. Some of the duties that are not maintenance-oriented were dumped on us (not searched out by mechanics). A good example is purchasing. When I started 8 years ago with the Forest Service our purchasing was done through a Blanket Purchase Account over seen by a purchasing agent. We now do 90% of our purchasing with Visa cards. The process to reconcile and the recordkeeping has cost us a tremendous amount of time that could be better spent turning wrenches. I supervise employees in four of the R5 shops affected by this study and I can not recall having to go out looking for duties to occupy the mechanics time because they lacked work if anything it has been the oppposite. The amount of fire fighting equipment that we maintain has greatly increased over the last few years due to MEL build up(and we have not increseased personnel in the shops). I have other examples but since this needs to be brief I will end it here. GovExec.com reader Posted February 10, 2004 2:32 PM