RecompetedThe Wahiawa Nonprofit on Friday's Board
Friday's Navy section carried a $90 million custodial vehicle at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam to a nonprofit that has held the work since 2011 and has never had a competitor. The organization is worth knowing, and so is the Federal Register ledger that says which way this channel is moving.
Friday's Navy section carried a $12,226,983 firm-fixed-price IDIQ, N6247826D2402, for custodial services at locations around Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
Maximum value with the base period and four option years is $90,000,000. Contracting activity is NAVFAC Honolulu.
The awardee is Opportunities & Resources, Inc., of Wahiawa, Hawaii.
The board closes the entry the way it always does for this kind of buy: "This contract was a sole source through AbilityOne under the authority of 41 U.S. Code 8501-8506, Javits-Wagner-O'Day Act."
So this is not a recompete, and it has not been one since 2011. The organization on the other end of it is the more interesting half.
Wahiawa, 1980
ORI was founded in 1980 by Susanna F. Cheung, on a $6,000 loan from her husband, as Opportunities for the Retarded, Inc. It took its current name in 2011. It works with people who have intellectual or developmental disabilities, and by its own account the Army's 65th Engineer Battalion out of Schofield Barracks turned up in the early years and volunteered to clear the land the training facility and homes were built on.
In 1984 it began operating Helemano Plantation, a restaurant, retail shops and a farm on ten acres off Kamehameha Highway. Today it runs nine licensed residential homes alongside the day and recreation programs.
None of that is on the award record. What is on the award record is fifteen years of buildings.
The Buildings
On July 1, 2011, the Committee for Purchase From People Who Are Blind or Severely Disabled published a proposed addition to the Procurement List: custodial services, with ORI as the nonprofit agency and NAVFAC Hawaii as the contracting activity. The final notice ran August 19 and took effect September 19, 2011.
Read the site list in that notice and it is the fleet concentration, building by building: Campbell Industrial, twenty-three buildings and a trailer at Makalapa, a hangar at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, Wheeler Army Air Base, Ford Island, NCTAMS Pacific at Wahiawa, Pearl City Peninsula, and the Pearl Harbor Complex.
NAVFAC signed the first contract, N62478-11-D-2380, on September 21. Two days after the listing took effect.
Then N62478-16-D-2452 in 2016, N62478-21-D-2402 in 2021, and Friday's vehicle. All four are coded the same way in FPDS: extent of competition B, "not available for competition," solicitation procedures SSS, one offer received, no set-aside, NAICS 561720.
Federal obligations to ORI ran $4.0M in fiscal 2011 and $9.3M in fiscal 2012, the first full year under the listing (chart above). They reached $14.1M in fiscal 2025.
Across fiscal 2009 through today the organization has been obligated $170.0 million, and 99.3% of it is Defense.
FPDS codes ORI a nonprofit and expressly not a small business, and the statute it works under is why. To be a designated source, an agency has to employ people who are blind or have other significant disabilities for at least 75% of the direct labor hours on the work (41 USC 8501).
SourceAmerica counts seven authorized provider agencies headquartered in Hawaii, 184 people with significant disabilities employed among them at an average $17.89 an hour, and $22.4 million in total sales. ORI's federal obligations alone were most of that number last year.
The List Moves Both Ways
The desk walked this channel on August 11, when the Air Force's JBER base operations requirement went from four bidders to a designated source in 136 days. What we said then, and did not measure, is that a listing ends when a nonprofit agency gives the work up.
It happens more often than that sentence suggests.
Across the 32 final Procurement List notices the Committee published in the twelve months to August 22, we count 14 service entries added and 81 deleted. Narrow it to entries where a DoD component is the contracting activity and it is 7 added against 42 deleted (chart below). These notices are not written to a fixed template, so treat that as our parse of the notice text rather than an official tally, though the direction is not close.
A deletion is the one event in this channel that creates work for everybody else. MICC Fort Carson janitorial, ACC-Picatinny janitorial, MICC Fort Eisenhower alarm monitoring and reception, ACC-APG Natick third-party logistics, four NAVFAC Southwest grounds and custodial entries: each of those came off the list inside the last twelve months, and each one is a requirement the government now has to buy somewhere else. The August 13 notice put its deletions into effect on September 12, thirty days out, which is more forward notice than most sources-sought gives you.
Nobody synopsizes it. It is a weekly Federal Register notice from an agency that does not run procurements, and the whole capture industry has a saved search on SAM instead.
Final Thoughts
The award record and the organization tell two halves of the same fifteen-year story, and only one half shows up in a pipeline tool.
Friday's vehicle runs to 2032, and for the whole of it the Pearl Harbor complex gets cleaned by people who, on the government's own arithmetic, do three quarters of the hours on the work.
The board line will not reach USAspending until roughly November, because the public award record runs about ninety days behind. The Federal Register notice that made it possible has been sitting there since 2011.
Thanks for reading.