EPA prepares to release $650 million contract opportunity

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to release a request for proposals May 8 for the successor to its Mission Oriented Systems Engineering Support II, or Moses II, contract.

The new contract, called ITS-ESE for Information Technology Solutions-Environmental Systems Engineering, will run for up to nine years and have a $650 million ceiling, said Mark Luttner, director of the Office of Information Collection, Office of Environmental Information, at EPA.

"In EPA history, this is a large acquisition," Luttner told the audience at a daylong conference held May 1 by market research firm Input Inc. The agency's total IT budget for fiscal 2003 is $450 million, he said.

ITS-ESE is a systems development contract that will include tasks in management, workload reporting, systems maintenance and operation, application security support, IT architectural support, data management support, statistical services, geographic information systems support, high-performance computing and visualization support, scientific application and computational science support and training.

The new contract will be a significant step up from Moses II, which was a five-year, $263 million contract. Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego was awarded that contract in 1998. The company also was the incumbent on the first Moses contract, awarded in 1991, which had a value of $242 million.

EPA has information trading agreements in place with about 40 states to participate in the Environmental Information Exchange Network, Luttner said. The purpose of network is to establish a standards-based, secure site to share environmental data.

The ITS-ESE vehicle will be "accessible to our state partners," he said.