GSA seeks to green all that it touches

By Jason Miller
Executive Editor
FederalNewsRadio

From Cleveland to Baltimore to Richmond, the General Services Administration wants to put solar panels on roofs of the buildings it runs.

These are just a few examples of how every program GSA runs for now on will have a green, or environmentally friendly, component.

"We will be dealing with some emerging technology and emerging companies," says Paul Prouty, acting GSA administrator. "We will be trying some things that are very, very new. We are doing our metrics to submit to Office of Management Budget for our budget. Generally those metrics are pretty refined. For the first time we say we will try a whole bunch of stuff and the stuff that works, we will use that."

Prouty says GSA wants to lead the country in using green products and services.

Much of this push for going green comes from the $5.5 billion GSA's Public Building Service received under the Recovery Act. Prouty says GSA's role in contracting out for those funds has put them in cabinet meetings for the first time with the President and Vice President.

"We have the clout now because of the Recovery Act," says Prouty Wednesday at the Coalition for Government Procurement conference in Arlington, Va.

Along those same lines, Prouty says GSA will request money for research and development for the first time in the agency's fiscal 2011 budget request.

"It's in the formative stages right now," he says. "We know there are some things that we have to do that we haven't done before. We got to figure some things out before we contract for it. We have to do some research and analysis."

Prouty adds that the funding would be for environmentally friendly products and services as well as information technology and other things GSA is interested in.

Vendors on the GSA schedule also could receive a boost in opportunities to sell green products and services. Steve Kempf, GSA's assistant commissioner in the Federal Acquisition Service's Office of Acquisition, says there are two bills—one in the House and one in the Senate—that would open up the schedules to state and local governments to purchase environmentally friendly products and services.

Kempf says these bills would expand GSA's growing cooperative purchasing offerings.

He says in fiscal 2009, state and local governments bought $564 million worth of goods and services from the schedules programs.

Overall, Kempf says the schedules earned more than $38 billion in sales in 2009, up three percent over 2008. FAS also saw a four percent increase in the number of vendors on the schedule with more than 17,800 total companies.

Kempf says the schedules success is part of the overall growth in FAS services.

"Our assisted acquisition services business had sales over just over $3.8 billion last year and was in the black again," he says. "It was a huge turnaround for them from a couple of years ago. They are successfully back on their feet."

In 2009, FAS also spent more than 300 million dollars on new fuel efficient vehicles for the government and helped purchase more than a billion dollars in goods and services for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And these numbers all could go up in 2010. Kempf says the Defense Department and GSA inspectors general audit of FAS's internal controls is expected to be completed in early 2010.

"From everything I've heard, things are going well," he says. "We expect to see a good conclusion of that this spring. That is good news for our organization and we are looking forward to the resolution of that and getting a clean bill of health."

DoD starting in 2005 reduced its use of GSA's services after the military IG found significant problems in contract oversight, including violations of the Anti-Deficiency Act.

The Pentagon has been using GSA, just not at the rate it once did.

Along with the audit, GSA continues to work on its relationship with its agency and vendor customers.

Kempf says after two years of work, GSA is implementing a service-oriented architecture to transform its acquisition business systems. He says new tools such as business management, acquisition planning, contract close out and pricing applications are on the way.

"We want an integrated system that integrates into the Integrated Acquisition Environment, to our business systems and to our financial systems," he says. "We want to make sure managers have the data they need to make good decisions about where they need to take the programs, where are our customers and what do we see growing or contracting?"

GSA also will roll out version 1 of the Rapid Addition Modification (RAM) tool later this month to make administrative modifications to schedule contracts easier. These may include changes of address or a new point of contact.

FAS also will implement RAM version 2 in late 2010 to let vendors make simple modification on their schedule contracts. This would happen when vendors plan to keep the same pricing structure on a new product or version of a product.

FAS also is looking at the future of evergreen contracting, and is rewriting the GSA acquisition regulations to change how they oversee and run the schedules program.

Finally, Kempf says FAS is developing new training courses on how to use the schedules. These will be shared with the Federal Acquisition Institute, the Defense Acquisition University and the Veterans Affairs acquisition academy toward the end of 2010.

"We are positioned to do well," Kempf says. "We've had a very good year. We obviously have some work to do as well."

-----

On the Web:

GSA-Go Green: GSA Environmental Initiatives

FederalNewsRadio-GPO and Dept. of Energy take going green to the next level

FederalNewsRadio-Agencies reduce energy usage by 12.4 percent in 2008

(Copyright 2009 by FederalNewsRadio.com. All Rights Reserved.)