It’s Hard to Put Price Lid on Toilet Covers

For 10 months now, officials at Burbank-based Lockheed have been squirming at the torrent of ridicule from newspaper cartoonists, comedians and weapons-procurement reformers over the $640 custom-made toilet cover that the firm built for a Navy plane.

Although convinced that it was taking a bad rap, Lockheed agreed in February to lower the price to $100 each for 54 of the toilet parts. And in July, it invited 30 small plastics-products firms to bid for the next lot of 10 covers.

Now Lockheed is claiming “we-told-you-so” rights. It feels vindicated because not one of the 30 companies entered a bid. With such a small number of covers required, “they knew they weren’t going to make a buck,” Lockheed spokesman Rich Stadler said last week. Which is what Lockheed has been contending all along.

“Our reason for going outside was to find out if there was a way to lower the price,” Stadler said. “The evidence we have shows we were offering a very fair price. If someone can do better, we’d be very happy for them to take over the job.”

Lockheed, he said, will continue to supply covers to the Navy at the “lowest possible price.”

At least one of the senators who had publicized the issue last February, amid growing congressional scrutiny of Defense Department procurement practices, hasn’t seen the light.

“It shows the inflexibility of large corporations to find good sources,” Sen. William V. Roth Jr. (R-Del.) said. “I’m not convinced that they can’t find a smaller company without high salaries and administrative costs to build these things cheaper.”

At issue is a plastic and fiberglass shroud that fits over the lavatory holding tank in the P-3 Orion submarine-hunting aircraft. Lockheed had produced hundreds of the planes without controversy until the Navy ordered 54 toilet covers as spares last year. Stadler said the covers are so costly to reproduce in small quantities because the Navy prescribed 30 specifications.

But one firm overlooked in the bidding process, Capital Plastics Co. of Kensington, Md., maintains that Lockheed’s bidding test isn’t definitive. Tim Sullivan, company vice president, said last week that the big defense contractor skewed the bid by limiting the quantity to 10. If the order were larger, he said, “I’d like a shot at it. Give me the seat, and let me do it. All I need is 120 bucks.”