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By Paul O’Leary
**Paul O’Leary is a Support Agreement Manager, at USAG Vicenza, Italy, Installation Management Command. He served in similar capacity at USAG Deagu, South Korea, and as Contract Management Support Officer, for the Defense Language Institute.**
WASHINGTON - OCONUS Support Agreement Managers (SAMs) are familiar with the intricacies of drafting and negotiating a support agreement with Department of Defense Dependent Schools (DoDDS). Each time I look at the DoDDS agreement I ponder the rational for the terms and conditions required by DoD directives and Army regulations. The DoDDS agreement is unique as it includes provisions for DoD directed support to the Student Meal Program (SMP) and use of an Other Use Factor (OUF) which both impact reimbursement to the Garrison.
To help visualize the process let me set the scene. Not unlike other Garrisons in Europe, DoDDS high school and District Office are located on one installation, a middle and elementary on another nearby installation, and another elementary located 250 miles away on yet another installation. Per DoDD 1015.5, the Military Departments are tasked to “ensure adequate resources, including facilities, minor construction, installed equipment, initial portable equipment, repair, and maintenance of facilities and installed equipment, utilities, and custodial service for the dining area, are available to conduct the DoD Student Meal Program.” In short, the Garrison provides non-reimbursable support to DoDDS for the school kitchens and cafetoriums. Although we all aspire to have the kitchens and cafetoriums separately metered for electric, water, heat, etc. the fiscal reality is not conducive.
Thus, we are left with a couple kitchens metered for electric, another for water, none for heating and thus a whole lot of pro-rata square feet calculations. Each billing cycle, the public works staff segregates DoDDS consumption from the three installations’ electric and water bills, taking the metered kitchens out of the mix and reducing the remaining amount by the cost attributable to the gross square feet of the unmetered kitchen/cafetorium at each school. They do a similar drill for the heat, and custodial and refuse contracts; but in the case of custodial, DoDDS utilizes a Total Maintenance Contract (TMC) to provide its own custodial, to include cleaning of the cafetoriums, and then bills the Garrison for that cost; an anomaly, the Garrison reimburses its tenant. This approach is problematic, as DoDDS use the cafetorium throughout the day for other than meal activities and it is difficult to ascertain what the Garrison is truly paying for.
On top of figuring out the SMP costs, the public works staff also needs to apply the agreed upon OUF to determine the net reimbursement due. DoD Manual 1342.6 defines the OUF as “the percentage by which engineering, custodial, refuse collection, real property rental, utilities, and other costs…shall be reduced by the supporting installation to compensate for the use of school facilities by organizations and/or activities other than DoDDs.” They way it works is the DoDDS charges the Garrison for any non-school related use of the school facilities - Scouts, CYS sports, etc. Hardly a community “quid pro quo,” as DoDDS easily exceeds 1000 dedicated/reserved hour’s use of Garrison sports facilities each year, yet the Garrison is required to pay for the minimal community use of a DoDDS facility.
The OUF process starts when a requesting community activity completes a request and a user’s agreement and submits both to the Garrison’s School Liaison Officer (SLO). The SLO staffs these documents to the Garrison Commander for signature –thereby acknowledging the non-availability of Garrison facility for community use. Next, the SLO forwards these signed documents to the applicable school principal for consideration. If approved, DoDDS staff tracks the community activity usage by square feet and hours. At year-end the SLO and DoDDS and Garrison SAM, review the record of facility usage to consider increasing or decreasing the OUF. The annual OUF is set by regulation at 20% unless the Garrison can prove otherwise.
The SMP and OUF inputs are needed to determine DoDDS net reimbursement to the Garrison. To keep it simple, for this part of the discussion we’ll use the pro-rata approach to determine the cost of utilities, refuse and custodial. Per terms of our current agreement, the DoDDS gross square footage (GSF) of the high school kitchen/cafetorium is 2.04%, middle and elementary 2.76% and satellite elementary 5.29%. The OUF for each is .07%, .13%, and 1.55% respectively – certainly nowhere near the regulatory suggested 20% and questionably worth tracking. Keeping in mind each installation has different utility rates and contract terms for refuse and custodial, let’s put it all together. DoDDS high school electric bill equals Kilowatt (Kw) cost per GSF minus the Kw cost per GSF of the kitchen/cafetorium. Same drill for the other two school locations. Likewise, a similar drill is used to determine the school refuse and custodial contract. However, as refuse generated by the kitchen/cafetorium is a Garrison responsibility, it gets very complicated trying to determine who pays what amount.
Add to the mix, the DoDDS District Office is fully reimbursable so none of the SMP/OUF percentages applies. Add also, DoDDS preference for separate annual funding annex for each school and the District Office. Given the hours spent by staff at Public Works, Resource Management and DoDDs budget office, the tracking, reporting and collecting, is no simple task and questionably efficient. In addition, the support agreement with various percentages applied to select services makes more than one person’s head hurt when trying to keep track of the various school sites and disparate utility and contract rates.
Thus, I suggest allocating DoDDS full Sustainment, Restoration, and Modernization (SRM) and base services Operations and Maintenance (O&M) funding for all facilities, to include the kitchen/cafetorium operations. Give DoDDS the full amount and responsibility. Let DoDDS use its Total Maintenance Contract (TMC) to perform all required maintenance and repairs and custodial, including the kitchen/cafeteria. Fully fund DoDDS to fully reimburse the Garrison for its fair and total share of utilities and refuse collection.
I further recommend both DoDDS and Garrisons learn how to play together in the sand box. As we are all one community, why not both support each other as possible and stop this mind-boggling use of the OUF. I suggest throughout Europe that the Garrison facilities are much more in demand and used by DoDDS than vice a versa and what little community use of DoDDS does occur, the cost for tracking and calculating the OUF outweighs the combined expense of DoDDS and the Garrisons. Just a thought.
| Date Taken: | 02.12.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 02.19.2015 09:10 |
| Story ID: | 154841 |
| Location: | WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, US |
| Hometown: | VICENZA, IT |
| Web Views: | 51 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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