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Regional centers made for contracting duties

The latest wave of Air Force consolidation and downsizing is the merger of contracting operations.

With the start of 2008, the Air Force opened a regional acquisition center at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas, to handle many contracting duties for bases in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

The service will follow up with other regional centers at Hampton Roads, Va.; Robins Air Force Base, Ga.; Scott Air Force Base, Ill.; and Colorado Springs. The centers will answer to Air Force Materiel Command.

The Air Force hopes to save money on base support functions by signing statewide or regional contracts instead of each base seeking separate agreements. The mergers also see base-level contracting offices and squadrons shrinking by about 50 percent.

“The squadrons at the installations will be significantly downsized,” Charlie E. Williams Jr., deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for contracting, said in an Air Force story. “A lot of the heavy lifting will be done at the regional center.

“For those contracting units that remain, their job will be to provide business advisory support for that installation and help them develop requirements and get those requirements into that system,” Williams said.

The merger of contracting offices comes at the same time the Air Force is consolidating personnel transactions at Randolph and payroll operations at Ellsworth Air Force Base, S.D.