Mid America: Year in review
 By Jeff Landenberger
  “Mid-America had an outstanding year,” DLA Disposition Services Mid-America Deputy Director Marc Wilson said. “It’s what I would consider a raving success.” By the numbers we had a pretty robust years with 417,000 receipts that had an original acquisition value of about 2.5 billion,” Humvees turned in by the Army wait for processing at DLA Disposition Service at Red River Army Depot, Texas.




a large number of Humvees painted desert tan set in two lines outside.
        Humvees
            Humvees turned in by the Army wait for processing at DLA Disposition Service at Red River Army Depot, Texas.

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                    VIRIN: 221101-D-YU183-007 He also stated they removed 52 million pounds of scrap and reutilized $286 million worth of property. Another highlight of the year took place at the DLA Disposition Services site at Colorado Springs. Area Manager Joe Cervi explained how his team supported the Air National Guard. Cervi explained that an Air National Guard range, like a lot of other ranges around the country, had used excess property from DLA Disposition Services as targets. This range had not had their scrap removed for years. A lot of the items needed demilitarization. Cervi and his team published an invitation for bid. The process was successful with contractors basing their bids on the metal content that they would remove. The contract was awarded for $20,000. “If we would have gone ahead and said ok, we need to clean up this range and we need to DEMIL all the property that is generated from there it probably would have cost at a minimum $800,000 to $1.5 million dollars service contract. We would have had to pay somebody to come in and do it,” Cervi said. “But in this case this contractor paid us $20,000.” Another big achievement for the region took place at the Red River Army Depot in Texas. Area Manager Cody Raley said his team was notified that the Army Material Command was going to be turning in 2,870 excess Humvees. “It was a combined effort here at Red River,” Raley said. “The Army was cutting the tickets to turn them in, but it was actually DLA Distribution employees that were going and locating the vehicles and bringing them over to us and then, we would in turn receive them.” The biggest challenge we had was figuring out where we could put them,” Raley said. “They were bringing us up to 150 a week.” He said they reworked their site’s yard to fit 400. Of course, that was not enough so Raley reached out to the base for help and a large field was made available for the overflow. They are still wrapping up the project as of mid-November. Raley said they were able to reutilize 212 of them and 1,200 were sent to be auctioned off. One accomplishment that DLA Disposition Services Mid-America Director Kathy Atkins-Nuñez, director of is proud of is the completion of three safety videos that her DSD had produced. “Safety is important,” Atkins-Nuñez said. “I wanted something to stress that to the workforce and to our new employees. We work in an industrial environment, and we need to take that serious.” She said each of the videos are five minutes or less and are part of the DSD’s new employee onboarding process and that the videos are being looked at by the safety office at the headquarters in Battle Creek to integrate them in their overarching training program as well. Looking forward Atkins-Nuñez said, “Our priority next year is going to be transitioning to WMS [Warehouse Management System]. Since San Antonio is leading the way as the pilot it’s imperative that we get it right. So, it can transition successfully across not only our region but all of the agency.”