Opinion ID: 666055
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Volume II--Facility Design

Text: 121 Latecoere received exceptional ratings in seven of the sixteen sections that comprised the non-foundation part of the Facility Design proposal. By contrast, ETC received exceptional ratings in only one of those sixteen sections. Urban concluded that, although Latecoere's enhancements for the non-foundation design part of its Facility Design proposal exceeded the requirements of the Solicitation, they did not appear to provide substantial benefits to the function of the facility. That conclusion flies in the face of the Solicitation, which invited offerors to design a facility that would be not only functional, but pleasant in appearance, of high quality, and most importantly, safe to use. Urban might have preferred a low-cost, technically-acceptable procurement, but the Solicitation that should have controlled his actions did not provide one. It was improper for him to act unilaterally as if it did. 122 Urban similarly refused to ascribe value to the technical superiority--not to mention the lower price--of Latecoere's foundation design, which was the other half of the Facility Design proposal. He summarily concluded that Latecoere's proposal should not have been rated exceptional just because Latecoere intended to consult with a geotechnical engineering firm, a plan that the Evaluation Board thought gave the proposal a high probability of success. Thus, even where Latecoere was superior in terms of cost as well as technical ability, Urban refused to deviate from his stubborn preference for ETC. 123 The GAO stated that Urban considered Latecoere's intent to subcontract with a geotechnical engineering firm to be 'reassuring' but not a substantial benefit over ETC's proposal which met [Solicitation] requirements. Wyle, 1990 WL 293722 at  8. Urban never called Latecoere's proposal reassuring. Instead, he simply rejected the Evaluation Board's rating, apparently reasoning that only a certainty of success would merit an exceptional rating. Urban's rationale for rejecting the rating is absurd. The Evaluation Board used the high probability of success language precisely because it was the very terminology the Solicitation used to define an exceptional rating. Urban's reasoning that a high probability of success rating is not good enough for an exceptional technical rating is further evidence that he ignored the Solicitation. His rejection of the impressive rating that the Evaluation Board gave to Latecoere's foundation design proposal is particularly irrational because the Evaluation Board team that rated this part of the design included geotechnical engineers. There is every reason to believe that they, unlike Urban, knew what they were doing. Those same engineers had previously concluded that ETC was lacking the technical ability to handle the complex foundation design requirements of the G-TIP. 124 Additionally, Urban's refusal to recognize the importance of the differences between Latecoere's and ETC's foundation design ignores important facts that former Selection Authority Rowley had emphasized in his selection document. In that document, which was issued during the first round of the selection process before any Buy American political considerations entered the picture, Rowley pointed out that the government had suffered substantial losses in the past due to problems with the foundations of two other centrifuge trainers. In particular, the government had been forced to abandon a training facility in Houston, Texas, when its foundation failed, and to limit the use of a training facility in Pensacola, Florida, when its foundation shifted. Thus, a stable and secure foundation was a critical safety feature. By equating ETC's and Latecoere's substantially different facility design ratings, Urban, unlike his predecessor in office, acted irrationally. Urban's stated rationale certainly does not support his decision to equate Latecoere's and ETC's facility design proposals. 125