Big cleanup - big contract.

• Author: Carroll, Ed

Even by Alaska's standards, a single contract worth maybe $240 million in cleanup work is a big piece of a big business.

Mike Redmond says he loves his job. Within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska, he's marching on the front line, carrying the banner of a new day.

Though Redmond's in the vanguard of a new military presence in Alaska, the contemporary Corps of Engineers is hardly known for its swashbuckling missions and tales of bold action. So it's a little surprising to see Redmond describe, with great energy and enthusiasm, and glories of his current campaign.

After all, this is contract administration - not the sexiest stuff in the world. And this is the Corps of Engineers; derided elsewhere in environmental cleanup circles by pronouncing the "P" in corps to imply a moribund bureaucracy.

But Redmond's an outsider in the Corps - in the private sector he negotiated for companies contracting with the Corps, and sometimes sued his future employer in contract disputes. He's bucked the typical migration, where money-managing bureaucrats learn the ropes of government business and then sell those skills to the companies they regulated.

Mike Redmond leads the Corps' effort in Alaska to spend tax dollars better while cleaning up polluted federal properties. He oversees the largest Corps contract in Alaska, the Total Environmental Restoration Contract (TERC), worth as much as $240 million over 10 years. The Corps team Redmond worked with for nearly a year to prepare the TERC, solicit bids and award the work has won high praise for its efforts.

The cleanup contract has some other people excited too, especially at Jacobs Engineering Group Inc., which won the contract July 31. Working from a strong base of contracts for Department of Defense site cleanups in Alaska, the 15,000-employee, Pasadena-based Jacobs grabbed the granddaddy of them all.

The Alaska TERC, a four-year contract with two, three-year extension options, was highly sought by eight environmental engineering firms, including one whose proposal was widely rumored to have cost more than $1 million to prepare. "I've heard that too," says Richard Greiling, Jacobs' TERC program manager. "What can I say, but, 'Shame on them.'"

But whether the TERC means that more of Alaska's polluted sites get cleaned up sooner remains to be seen. This mega-contract is designed to reward economy and efficiency in a costly and complex field that's fraught with overlapping regulation and bureaucracy. And even if it reaches the maximum value of $240 million, what share of Alaska cleanup work is that? It's a healthy share, but no one keeps statewide statistics on the industry.

Jockeying for Position

The selection process asked for a response plan to a complex contaminated-site scenario, and with Alaska-hire provisions included as selection criteria for the first time in a cleanup contract, local firms seeking a piece of TERC vied for spots as sub-contractors on a...