GSA team helps make 2020 Census count

February 27, 2019

At first glance the effort for Census 2020 may seem a considerably lighter lift for GSA than in the past with space requests down more than 50% from 2010.

Here in the Great Lakes Region, for example, Regional Census Center locations have been cut to just one 29,000-square-foot location, Area Census Offices decreased from 80 to 34, and the National Processing Center – one of two in the country – reduced its space requirements from 700,000 to 300,000 sq. ft.

However, Jeanette Lopez-Torralba, 2020 Census Zone Executive, and her leasing team actually had a much heavier lift due to two new requirements: 1) use of a new online tool to collect lease offers and 2) no use of outside brokers or limited construction management services to help set execute or build out spaces.

“So much of the work had to be handled internally,” said Lopez-Torralba. “In 2010 we had a broker contract that did a lot of the work. Now we had to do the heavy lifting ourselves, everything from market outreach to project tracking to day-to-day paperwork. And we had to use a brand new tool for securing leases.”

Their biggest challenge was generating interest from the real estate community, and the team spent a large amount of time cold-calling, emailing and meeting face-to-face with prospective lessors to try and produce offers.

But first, they had to learn the new tool – the Automated Advanced Acquisition Program – and then promote its use to lessors. AAAP allows people to electronically submit and update offers for building space to the federal government in response to Requests for Lease Proposals. The team had minimal experience using the system, so they trained with program experts, videos and dummy projects to learn the program and help lessors submit offers.

When the system’s week-long offer period began each month, the team would remind lessors to submit their offers for consideration. After offers were submitted and ranked, the team was responsible for touring locations and preparing reports about whether buildings could meet Census’ needs before deciding on a location.

The team’s new duties didn’t stop with pre-award either. Previous Census leasing efforts could count on a full complement of contracted construction services to jump in after lease award and help oversee most of the design and construction drawing review, cost proposal, negotiation and construction management work. Without that help, the team had to pick up the slack.

And, as zone executive, Lopez-Torralba’s duties were even more extensive since she oversaw all GSA work for the Chicago Census office, whose area includes GSA’s six Great Lakes states but also Arkansas, Iowa and Missouri.

“She’s not a [trained] supervisor,” said her boss, Andy Katzmann, “yet she had her team of 20 Region 5 people to manage and also Region 6 people who were involved. She had to work with those people’s supervisors to make sure the work was getting done. She attended meetings with lessors, Census, her team… she jumped into the weeds on everything. She was not going to let this fail.”

But Lopez-Torralba credits her success to so many others.

“What amazed me was how many people played into this project,” she said, “how many people throughout GSA responded so professionally and so quickly. I was overwhelmed with how much support and how many people I had to work with in such a short period of time.”

Currently, 33 area office leases have been awarded (another has been built out in Chicago’s Metcalfe Federal Building) and construction has begun on the first five. Leases for the larger National Processing Center in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and Regional Census Center in Chicago were executed in August 2017 and January 2018 respectively, both through 2020.

Meanwhile, Region 5 GSA's Federal Acquisition Service also continues to be a key element in supporting the U.S. Census, particularly in working with the National Processing Center in Indiana. R5 Customer Service Director Don Blanton works directly with the center’s Chief Procurement Officer, Thomas Sherman, and has support from GSA's Northeast and Caribbean Supply and Acquisition Center Director Peter Han in New York.

On March 6, 2019, Region 5 GSA met with Census to provide an acquisition capabilities review and a customer requirements analysis. We learned that beyond the population-based Decennial Census, the agency also runs an Economic Census, an Agriculture Census every five years, and a Government
Census (last done in 2017), and they rely heavily on GSA’s support to accomplish these activities.

Currently, Region 5 GSA is providing three acquisition services: form printing (first order 183,000 units), shredding and security. We have also suggested
GSA acquisition support for background investigation requirements for an expected 3,000 new hires for the 2020 Decennial.