UC Regents OK Lab Bid

SAN FRANCISCO — The first competition to manage Los Alamos National Laboratory began in earnest Thursday as University of California regents approved the university’s effort to hang onto its decades-long role in running the nuclear weapons facility.

The regents also postponed a vote on a controversial proposal to raise fees as much as 7% this fall for various categories of UC students in professional programs such as law, medicine, pharmacy and business on some campuses.

The board’s long-awaited but anti-climactic decision to enter the Los Alamos contract competition came on an 11-1 vote with no discussion.

It ratified the recommendation of two key regents’ committees a day earlier in favor of allowing the university and several industrial partners to proceed with a bid.

UC officials have said that the university was prepared to spend about $2 million to prepare its bid to manage the New Mexico facility, which UC has run for the federal government since 1943. S. Robert Foley, UC’s vice president for laboratory administration, said the money would be drawn from the university’s fee to run the lab and would not require additional state or university funds.

The university is pursuing the Los Alamos contract with several partners, including Bechtel National Inc., a division of the San Francisco-based engineering giant.

Representatives of the university and its partners say they are reluctant to disclose details of their plans, in light of steep competition for the contract expected from defense contractor Lockheed Martin and possibly others.

But Bechtel National President Thomas Hash said soon after Wednesday’s preliminary vote that the team’s representatives were hard at work on their bid “in an undisclosed Bechtel location.”

Bidders must submit their proposals to the federal Department of Energy by July 19. The seven-year Los Alamos contract is expected to be awarded by December.

With only 12 regents of the 26-member board in attendance Thursday, the regents agreed not to act immediately on the proposed fee hikes for some professional school students but to instead hold a special meeting on the issue soon.

Student representatives and several regents objected to the proposed increases, which would vary by campus and school but would have been in addition to an earlier 3% fee jump for the same year.

The higher proposed cost “is extremely dismaying to thousands of professional school students who come to UC for quality as well as affordability,” said Jennifer Lilla, a UC San Francisco graduate student who heads the UC Student Assn.

UC leaders and the deans of several of the affected schools said the increases were necessary to offset state budget cuts, but agreed to wait for a vote until more regents could participate.

The proposed increases, for example, would be $205 a year for UCLA nursing students, bringing their estimated total fees to $10,520, not including room, board, books and other expenses; for those pursuing a master’s in business administration at UCLA, fees would jump $1,163 to $25,723.

In addition, other proposals call for some students to pay another $1,050 a year over the next two years to help the university make up for revenues that it was unable to collect because of a lawsuit against such increases.