BATH, Maine — The U.S. Coast Guard on Thursday issued a notice to proceed to Eastern Shipbuilding Group, which in September beat out Bath Iron Works and a Louisiana shipyard for a $2.4 billion contract to build the first nine offshore patrol cutters.
The ships will be part of a new class of 25 offshore patrol cutters designed to replace a fleet of 29 medium-endurance cutters ranging from 25 to 50 years old.
Bath Iron Works and Bollinger Shipyard of Louisiana, which along with Florida-based Eastern had been contracted to perform preliminary and contract design for the new class of ships, were the unsuccessful finalists for the contract.
On Sept. 15, the Coast Guard announced that Eastern had been awarded a $2.4 billion contract to build the first nine cutters in a new line, with the potential to build two more. Should Eastern Shipbuilding Group eventually build the full class of 25 cutters, the contract would be worth about $11 billion.
Neither BIW nor Bollinger filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office within the 10-day window to do so.
The three bid amounts would only have been made public had one of the losing shipyards filed a protest.
BIW spokesman Matt Wickenheiser on Thursday declined to comment on why BIW did not file a protest.
BIW President Fred Harris had said that despite continuing work on four DDG 51 destroyers, with another three in the pipeline, without the Coast Guard contract, as many as 1,200 manufacturing employees, or 35 percent, of the shipyard’s workforce, could be laid off.
On Wednesday, Jay Korman, senior Navy analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm The Avascent Group, said, “Most often, companies will back away from a protest after a debrief from the customer where it’s clear that the competition had some distinct advantages that are tough to argue. Sometimes that’s based on a big cost differential. Sometimes it’s based on technical competencies or managerial approaches or the business case offered to the customer. In those situations, companies will realize that a bid protest is a long shot that would just serve to annoy the customer, so they choose to keep their powder dry, preserve the relationship and gear up for the next big competition.”