Background
The Navy awarded CCS King George 2, LLC a nearly $100 million base-operations support contract covering custodial and other services at Naval Base Coronado. The best-value solicitation made non-price factors significantly more important than price. CCS KG and Chugach Logistics and Facility Services JV, LLC both received outstanding overall technical ratings, but CCS KG received the higher past-performance rating and offered a price of approximately $82.44 million. Chugach offered approximately $107.24 million—about 30% more than CCS KG.
Chugach challenged the Navy’s evaluation on several grounds. It argued that the Navy improperly credited CCS KG with experience its mentor, King & George LLC, gained through other joint ventures; failed to evaluate the experience of CCS KG’s protégé; ignored King & George’s marginal quality rating on a recent predecessor janitorial contract at the same base; failed to conduct a price-risk assessment; and consequently made a flawed best-value determination.
The Court’s Holding
The Court sustained the protest only as to past performance. It held that the Navy acted arbitrarily by failing to consider King & George’s recent marginal quality rating for custodial work at Naval Base Coronado. The solicitation permitted consideration of CPARS information beyond the projects submitted as corporate-experience references, the prior contract involved services central to the new procurement, and the adverse assessment was personally known to an evaluation-board member who had signed it. Because the contemporaneous record gave no reason for omitting that information, the Court would not accept post hoc explanations.
The Court found the error prejudicial because CCS KG’s superior past-performance rating was a principal discriminator in the best-value decision, while Chugach had equal or better non-price ratings elsewhere and the solicitation made non-price factors significantly more important than price. The Court rejected Chugach’s other claims: the solicitation allowed credit for prime-level experience King & George gained as a joint-venture member; Chugach waived its protégé-experience argument by not challenging the solicitation’s patent terms before bidding closed; and any failure to search the Supplier Performance Risk System was harmless because no assessments existed for either offeror. The Court granted a permanent injunction requiring the Navy to cancel CCS KG’s award and barring a new award unless and until the proposals are reevaluated consistently with the decision.
Key Takeaways
- An agency may have to consider highly relevant adverse past-performance information that is “too close at hand,” particularly when an evaluator personally knows of it and the solicitation permits its consideration.
- A patent conflict between a solicitation’s evaluation terms and an asserted regulatory requirement must be challenged before bidding closes or the argument is waived.
- Where past performance materially drove a best-value selection, an unsupported evaluation can establish prejudice even when the protester proposed a substantially higher price.
Why It Matters
The decision underscores that broad agency discretion over past-performance evaluations does not permit evaluators to ignore directly relevant information already in their possession without a contemporaneous explanation. Agencies also cannot cure an undocumented evaluation judgment through rationales first supplied during protest litigation.
For contractors, the ruling highlights both sides of bid-protest preservation: offerors should raise facial solicitation defects before proposals are due, but they may obtain relief after award when the record shows that an agency overlooked close-at-hand information capable of changing a decisive evaluation factor.