ee LGM LA be United States Department ofthe Interior OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY WASHINGTON, D.C. 20240 AUG 13 1980 Mr. Charles T. Domnick Deputy Secretary of Foreign Affairs Government of the Marshall Islands Majuro, Marshall Islands 96960 Dear Mr. Donmmick: We have your letter of August 8, concerning the implementation of Section 102 of Public Law 96-205. We were pleased to be able to meet with representatives of the Marshall Islands Government on August 6, as its representatives had asked us to do. We regretted your absence, and the absence of other Marshall Islands Government representatives, from our August 4 consultations with other involved parties, inasmuch as the pertinent Federal agencies were more fully represented on that earlier date. As you know, we acted in June to schedule the consultations for August 4 and to invite participation by the Marshall Islands Government, so as to afford all prospective attendees many weeks of advance notice. Several of the Federal experts who had arranged to be present on the scheduled date were otherwise committed for August 6, since none of us knew until August 4 that you would not be present that day, but wanted instead to meet two days later. Nevertheless, we did our best to accommodate you on short notice, and from your letter we infer that you found our several-hour session of some value. As you know from our Discussion Paper dated August 1, which we hand-delivered to you in Washington on that date, we are confronted with a necessarily tight time schedule in implementing Section 102, in light of the deadline for the submission of a report that the Congress has imposed upon us. We therefore cannot provide more time than we have already agreed to for comment on what we expect to ask the contractor to do. That is, as our Discussion Paper of August 1 states, before the close of business on August 18 we must have any comments you wish to offer on the material contained in our Discussion Paper under the title of "Responsibilities of the Contractor" -- which is the same as a "scope of work", Because of our early deadline, and because the procurement process is itself time-consuming, we concluded that we needed to approach prospective contractors as soon as possible. Accordingly, this Department mailed an initial Request for Proposals to seven contractors on August 8. I so advised your counsel on August ll, enclosing a copy of the request. Enclosed herewith is a copy