[Protest of NOAA Contract Award]

Two firms protested the award of a requirements contract issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service under a request for proposals for housing and transportation services for students attending the National Weather Service Training Center. The protesters contended that the requirement should have been met through formal advertising rather than negotiation. The protesters also argued that the protest should have been considered under that portion of the procedures that provides for consideration of untimely protests where good cause is shown. In addition, the protesters contended that the forms used in evaluating each offerer's facility were defective and that the actual evaluations of the protesters' proposals were arbitrary. GAO held that: (1) the protest that the procurement should have been advertised rather than negotiated is dismissed as untimely since the choice of procurement method was apparent from the face of the solicitation and the protest was not filed until after the contract had been awarded; (2) whether a particular procurement should have been advertised rather than negotiated depends largely on the special facts and circumstances existing in each case and is not a significant issue under bid protest procedures so as to warrant consideration of the issue despite its untimely filing; (3) since an agency is required to disclose in advance neither details of the evaluation process nor the existence of evaluation subcriteria, there was no obligation to provide prospective offerers with copies of evaluation forms containing the subcriteria; (4) it had no basis to object to the use of evaluation subcriteria that reasonably related to the stated major criteria and reflected the relative weight accorded those major criteria; and (5) where the review of both the numerical scores assigned to the protesters' proposal and written comments of the evaluators revealed that the low scores achieved by the protesters were rationally based, there was no basis for concluding that the evaluations of the protesters' proposals were arbitrary. Accordingly, the protest was dismissed in part and denied in part.