Advertiser wins Navy
printing contract

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By Rick Daysog
rdaysog@starbulletin.com

The Navy has awarded the Honolulu Advertiser a five-year contract to publish the Hawaii Navy News.

Navy officials selected the Advertiser last week ahead of MidWeek Printing Co. to print, distribute and sell advertising for the 15,000-circulation weekly publication.

The move comes after the Navy selected the Advertiser for the contract in January, only to rescind the award one month later in response to a formal bid protest by MidWeek.

"We're very pleased to prevail in this second round of bidding," said Mike Fisch, president and publisher of the Advertiser. "Our submission was very similar and we received a similar rating."

The Hawaii Navy News is a weekly publication circulated to Navy personnel and their dependents at Pearl Harbor and other local Navy facilities. The contract runs until 2007, but the Navy has the right to renew every two years.

MidWeek Printing, whose sister company Oahu Publications owns the Star-Bulletin, had held the contract since the 1980s before the Navy awarded the work to the Advertiser in January.

In February, MidWeek filed a formal protest with the General Accounting Office in Washington, D.C., alleging that the Navy gave the Gannett Co.-owned Advertiser an unfair advantage by touring its printing plant.

MidWeek also said the Navy amended the selection criteria for the contract two days after the deadline to submit bids.

Navy officials had no comment on the bidding process. The Advertiser, which has published the Navy News since February under an interim contract, has denied that it has received favorable treatment.

MidWeek's President Don Kendall renewed charges that the bidding process was flawed.

In a letter to Rear Adm. Robert Conway on Tuesday, Kendall said that a local Navy contracting officer informed MidWeek on April 5 that the March 11 deadline for bids would be extended to April 5. The extension ended three days before the Navy awarded its contract to the Advertiser on April 8, Kendall said.

Kendall also complained that the Navy used a "flawed process" to evaluate the bids.

He said that a Navy selection advisory committee in January rated MidWeek's past performance as "excellent."

But a second advisory committee downgraded MidWeek's past performance to "satisfactory" before a contracting official overruled the committee and gave MidWeek a "good" rating, Kendall said.

"Without publishing an edition of the Navy News between February and April, our performance rating went from 'excellent' to 'satisfactory' and back to 'good' in the eyes of the Navy," Kendall said.

A Navy spokeswoman said Conway has received Kendall's letter and will carefully review issues raised in the letter.