Alaska’s Disadvantaged Businesses Comfortable that Obama’s Rules Won’t Affect Them

March 11, 2009 by Matthew Potter · Comment
Filed under: Alaska, Business Line, Congress, Contract Awards, Editorial, Events, Federal Budget Process, IT, Industry Analysis, Services, States, logistics 

Last Tuesday, 4 March, President Obama announced some new rules affecting how the government will try to contract. One of them is to try and reduce, or even eliminate, no-bid contracts. Of course he may not have explored fully Federal procurement rules and goals. One of the types of companies that qualify to get these sole source contracts are disadvantaged, minority owned corporations. This rule is to encourage Federal work flowing to these companies. Now the Alaskan Native corporations (ANC) have put out that this change in how the government will operate won’t affect them. TMCNet.com reports that the four largest of these all basically said that their business will continue. Most of these disadvantaged business are limited to contracts under $5 million, but due to a quirk in the law the ones owned by Alaskan natives do not have such limits. In 2004 these ANC had over $1 billion in business. This illustrates that some reforms, if it is a reform, will be harder then others due to the various, somewhat arcane provisions, of Federal contracting and the different goals set by the government. If you want to encourage non-traditional companies from doing business you may have to accept or adjust your desires in other areas.

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More on the Alaskan Missile Range Corruption Case

December 3, 2008 by Matthew Potter · 1 Comment
Filed under: Alaska, Congress, Contract Awards, Federal Budget Process, MDA, S&T, SMDC, U.S. Air Force, crime, development program, missile defense, space 

We have written in the past about Mr. Cantrell, an manager at the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC), and his corruption scheme that will lead to his jailing on taking bribes from contractors in the past here and here. Now The Kodiak Daily Mirror has more details on how Mr. Cantrell used Alaskan Senator Stephens to build a range on Kodiak Island which allowed him to get the necessary work in order to generate the kickbacks. Read more

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Missile Defense corruption

October 12, 2008 by Matthew Potter · Comment
Filed under: Alabama, Alaska, Congress, MDA, S&T, SMDC, U.S. Army, crime, development program, missile defense 

Last year the US Government arrested two employees of the US Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC) on charges that they were taking bribes to steer contracts to selected companies. Now the New York Times has done some further research on the issue and have found out that the main figure, the head of SMDC S&T center, had created a whole scheme to make Congress fund a large test program that would then be self-perpetuating. As part of this he broke Federal law by lobbying Congress directly.

The scheme he concocted was one that when I worked supporting the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO), now Missile Defense Agency (MDA), never made much sense to me. The MDA had an issue with testing the systems against long range targets. They targets required could not be tested in the United States as there was no range big enough to hold them. The Navy invested in improving their range on the West Coast of Kuaii in Hawaii that faced a broad open area. Targets would be air launched and fired into the range. The Army looked at building a launch facility on Midway to fire that targets at their main range in Kwajalien. The gentlemen at the core of the scandal, Mr. Cantrell, worked a proposal directly with Congress and various contractors to build a facility in Alaska on Kodiak Island and then use an old Navy helicopter carrier to fire the targets at Kodiak. This never really made sense due to its cost and the creation of all new facilities and modifying the ship at some cost.

Ultimately the idea went nowhere, although a launch facility has been built at Kodiak which supports Air Force operations right now. MDA made the sensible decision to begin testing US Army systems in Hawaii using the range there. Now that it turns out the Mr. Cantrell and various Senators using the earmark system was doing this for personal gain.

See an article in the Huntsville Times here.

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