TAKIN’ CARE OF (SMALL) BUSINESS: ARIZONA’S ALDRICH WINS COMMANDER’S EXCELLENCE AWARD FOR INNOVATIVE CONTRACTS

Dick Aldrich

Then Dick Aldrich joined the Corps. In the two decades that followed, he acted as a troubleshooter, moving from St. Louis District to Fort Huachuca to Panama and now to Phoenix. Along the way, the 53-year-old civil engineering technician picked up enough experience and expertise to recently be named one of only eight winners of the Commander’s Small Business Team of Excellence for 2002. Lieut. Gen. Bob Flowers picked the eight team members.

With typical modesty, Aldrich says the award “caught me off guard. But it’s pretty neat to be recognized by your peers, people I was working with.”

Basically, Aldrich was honored for a creative strategy he devised in the mid-‘90s. He recognized the need for a cost-effective, high-quality, short time-frame demand instrument to meet District customer requirements in the $500,000-and-less range. Those requirements generally weren’t scoped out, and sometimes incidental design was required to finish a job. Aldrich worked with team members from Los Angeles Division, and the first performance-oriented construction activity contract (POCA) was awarded to a Small Business Administration 8(a) contractor for an amount which couldn’t exceed $3 million or three years—whichever came first.

The contract was so successful that the first one reached its capacity in less than a year. Today, the District’s Arizona/Nevada Area Office has awarded seven POCA contracts.

In January 2000, Aldrich was asked to develop a contract with design and construction capabilities. Once again working with Los Angeles team members, he created a multipurpose design-and-build contract; the amount wasn’t to exceed $400 million or 60 months--again, whichever came first. The multiple award design-build contract consisted of three 8(a) and five unrestricted contractors.

Acquisition strategy is the name of the game, and it soon became apparent to Aldrich that there was a gap between performance-oriented construction activity contracts and design-build contracts. To fill that gap, Aldrich formulated a hybrid: a best-value, trade-off multiple award performance-oriented construction contract whose ceiling is $29,950,000 or 36 months, whichever comes first. It’s an 8(a) set-aside, awarded to nine contractors and is mainly for design-bid-build but can be used for performance requirements.

The contract was structured to accommodate the awards of three groups of three contractors each, one for each Area Office—High Desert, Southern California and Arizona/Nevada.

Aldrich cites as an example of the nimbleness and agility of these contracts the case of an Arizona flood. As soon as the immediate problem of protecting residents from the flood was resolved, temporary housing became the next most urgent need. Within three days of the disaster, the small business contractor signed by Aldrich submitted a drawing for a 70-unit complex, including utilities and water, and also price estimates and a detailed scope of the work. “It was a total success at a reasonable price,” Aldrich recalls. “We can use these (contracts) for emergency situations.”

During his stint at Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona, the one-time cav tanker could have passed for a frontier gunfighter with his flowing Custer-length hair and mustache. But he hasn’t owned or fired a weapon since his days in Vietnam, preferring instead to cast a fly rod in both fresh and salt water.

He’s maintained his thirst for adventure, and the 18-month tour in Panama helped quench that. He worked on civilian and military projects in Ecuador and Honduras, and even a plane breaking down in Quito—at 8,146 feet altitude—couldn’t keep him from calling the assignment “the best tour I ever had.” The tropical environment suited him and his wife Cathy, and they are aggressively searching for their next equatorial adventure.

Maybe surprisingly, Aldrich doesn’t credit his military experience or any institution with making him who he is. “My father had more influence on me than any organization,” Aldrich says. “He was very regimented. He just treated us kids like he did his GI’s.”

In the mosaic of his career, Dick Aldrich has combined two of the military’s most revered mottos: The Corps’ own Essayons! and the 11th Armored Cav’s Allons! We will try. We will go.

And he has.