Home Care In Twentynine Palms, CA

ROCKVILLE, Md., Oct. 5, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- GSD Services, LLC, a Small Business Administration (SBA) approved Mentor Protégé Joint Venture between NIKA Technologies, Inc. (NIKA) and King & George, LLC (King George) announced today that the Department of the Navy, Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command, NAVFAC Southwest has awarded GSD Services the Base Operations Support Contract (BOSC) supporting Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC) Twentynine Palms, California (CA).

The single award Firm Fixed Price, Indefinite-Delivery/Indefinite-Quantity contract has an estimated value of $117M, over an 8-year ordering period. Work to be performed under this new contract will include recurring and non-recurring work for facilities investment, custodial, integrated solid waste management, and water support services. The contract also includes the operations and maintenance of the installation's water treatment plant.

NIKA's Chief Executive Officer and President (GSD's Managing Member), Kabir Chaudhary remarked: "We look forward to continuing our strong partnership with the Navy and working with the Twentynine Palms Public Works Division to support the training and operations experience of Armed Forces personnel who use Twentynine Palms to live, work and train."

"We are pleased to announce this new contract win for GSD Services and our commitment to supporting our DoD customers" stated George Bernard, Chief Executive Officer of King George. "King George and NIKA have an excellent track record of creating successful collaborations, and we look forward to working together to unlock the potential of our combined facilities support businesses."

MCAGCC Twentynine Palms is the largest United States Marine Corps base covering a total area of 596,288 acres located in the high desert of Southern California. The Combat Center's unique mission is to conduct relevant live-fire combined arms training, urban operations, and Joint/Coalition level integration training that promotes operational force readiness as well as to provide the facilities, services, and support responsive to the needs of resident organizations, Marines, sailors, and their families today and tomorrow.

About NIKA NIKA delivers comprehensive services and solutions to support the full life cycle of facilities and infrastrucure. For more than two decades, the Department of Defense and federal civilian agencies, as well as commercial and higher education institutions, have trusted NIKA to operate, maintain, and manage their real property and infrastructure systems. NIKA's mission support, logistics, and engineering and program management services provide their customers with the value and expertise to ensure operational readiness and extend the life of critical facilities. Headquartered in Rockville, MD, with offices in San Antonio, TX, NIKA helps clients enhance operational excellence in locations around the globe.

For more information about NIKA, please visit http://www.nikasolutions.com.

About King GeorgeKing George is a minority-owned commercial and Government services contractor specializing in base operations support services, general contracting and construction management, vehicles and equipment maintenance, logistics, and environmental services. Their clients include the U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, Federal Aviation Administration, and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. King George has been ranked in INC. 5000's fastest-growing companies as the leadership team has rapidly transformed the company from a small startup to a business that currently has $200 million in yearly revenue, more than 1,200 employees, and operations of 120 contracts that encompass 160 sites.

For more information about King George, please visit http://www.kinggeorge.us.

For further information, contact:Rosanna Cruz[email protected](301) 770-3520

SOURCE GSD Services, LLC; NIKA

TWENTYNINE PALMS — After 8½ years on the job, Frank Luckino is leaving his post as city manager. He has been hired as city manager of Desert Hot Springs.

“I am very excited about the opportunity, excited to grow as a city manager,” Luckino told The Desert Trail Wednesday morning, Oct. 4.

He will serve a larger population and face larger challenges in his new position, he said.

He added that his feelings about the move are bittersweet.

“I love the city of Twentynine Palms. I love our council the staff, this has a special place in my heart. The opportunity just presented itself,” he said.

He noted he was one of 29 people who applied for the job when Desert Hot Springs’ city manager resigned earlier this year.

“I think I interviewed three or four weeks ago. I think there was a second interview a week and a half ago. Today I will formally give my resignation notice. I will be giving them four weeks.”

He acknowledged that his departure may adversely affect the city’s ongoing efforts to develop a wastewater treatment system, in part because he is the only city staff member with wastewater experience.

“That will definitely be a challenge,” he said.

Luckino oversaw the largest project in the city of Twentynine Palms’ history: the funding and construction of the Project Phoenix development in downtown Twentynine Palms. He pointed to Project Phoenix as one of his accomplishments.

“You want to leave a city better than you found it. I believe that I have done that,” he said.

“We are definitely going through growing pains. Those growing pains are better than the alternative — nothing. Project Phoenix was a great accomplishment by the city,” he said.

“I wish him well and I hope it all works out great,” council member Dan Mintz said of Luckino’s departure.

“I wish he was still here. He has been a great city manager. We got a lot of things done in the past eight years.”

The council, he said, will move to hire an interim city manager before moving on to find a permanent replacement.

He said he hoped the transition does not adversely affect ongoing city projects, like sewage treatment and the retooling of the Tourism Business Improvement District.

“I am hoping we can keep moving forward,” Mintz said.

“I’m still processing everything,” Mayor McArthur Wright said.

“It’s going to cause some delays until we find a new city manger. Frank will be hard to replace so we have to take our time so we get it right.”

Desert Hot Springs council members voted unanimously at their Tuesday, Oct. 3 meeting to hire Luckino.

Mayor Scott Matas confirmed that the city received 29 applications after its previous city manager resigned in February.

“I was looking for someone with financial acumen and experience,” Desert Hot Springs Councilman Russell Betts said “Frank stood out as just exceptional.”

“All I can say on behalf of the residents is, let’s move mountains,” Mayor Pro Tem Roger Nunez added.

Luckino was in the audience and spoke after the vote. He thanked his family, who was in the audience, and the council.

“I’m looking forward to this opportunity,” he said.

“I’m looking forward to working with staff to move those mountains. I’m excited about it and I’m looking forward to Nov. 6 and hitting the ground running.”

He noted he’ll be working with former Twentynine Palms Community Development Director Travis Clark, who now works for Desert Hot Springs.

Matas said Luckino’s compensation will include a $235,00 annual salary, deferred compensation of $12,000, plus an auto allowance and insurance contribution from the city.

The Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians is a federally-recognized Native American tribe located in Southern California. Descendants of the Chemehuevi people, the Band has settled at the sacred site known as the Oasis of Mara, located near the town of Twentynine Palms, California.

The Twenty-Nine Palms Reservation was established by the Executive Order of 1895 and expanded in 1979 with an additional parcel in Coachella, California.

Today, the Tribe has built businesses and governmental operations on its sovereign lands, with Spotlight 29 Casino and the Tribal Government Offices near the city of Coachella, and Tortoise Rock Casino near the town of Twentynine Palms. And it has big plans in the future to expand, through the building of hotels and the creation of its own energy grid.

However, just a few short years ago, Twenty-Nine Palms was struggling with a huge assortment of different systems to manage its government and business affairs, which were split over two different sites. With its growth ambitions, it decided that a change was needed and that it needed to consolidate onto modern, cloud-based software.

We got the chance to speak with Anthony Kosturos, CFO of Twenty-Nine Palms, at Oracle’s annual CloudWorld event this week in Las Vegas. Kosturos said:

Just like many other Tribes, there were two distinct sets of everything, systems and people - one for the casino, and then one for everything else.

So you have two different HR platforms, finance, two CFOs, two IT directors. It's a big waste of effort, right? Especially when many of these Tribes are very small, and it doesn't really require all that. So, our Chairman made the decision to group everything into one shared service that will take care of all the Tribe. Not only the current casino and government, but also all the things he has envisioned for the future.

Kosturos said that in HR Twenty-Nine Palms had three or four different systems, in finance it had a system that he described as ‘casino-centric’, green-screen based and difficult to use. It also had twelve different QuickBooks accounts, which made rolling up the accounts difficult and consolidation only happened once a year at audit.

In 2019 Twenty-Nine Palms began merging all of its teams - finance, HR and IT - for both the casinos and government, in anticipation of a move to new technology. In 2020 it started talking to different vendors, assessing its options, and ended up selecting Oracle Fusion and Microsoft 365. Kosturos added:

We needed something that was going to carry us through to the new hotel, to the new travel center, to the future businesses.

Twenty-Nine Palms also, since consolidating its approach, has found it easier to recruit directors and VPs, which have come from all across the country to help drive its future growth vision - something that was important to the Tribe.

So, it made the decision to go with Oracle Fusion for financials, procurement, and HCM in 2020 and went live with a Big Bang approach on January 1st 2021. One of the key benefits the move has enabled is increased automation and cost savings. Kosturos said:

For us a lot of automation that we weren't using before is now coming into play. I think our AP volume has tripled and we've pretty much had the same staff as we did before. Just small things too, like the e-workflows with approvals. We used to have people walking around with stacks of crates for one approval or the next approval. To get a check, from the time it got invoiced to the time It got the check outside was weeks, because the AP team would be carrying the paper from approver to approver.

Things were just getting delayed for no reason. Now with the e-workflows we can get something received on Monday and paid by Thursday.

And the best part for me is we can go in and pull historical invoices now. Before, we would store them on site for three years and then we would send it over to Iron Mountain. We were paying $120,000 a year just storing invoices. But we just did a document destruction of 8000 documents.

Change management is a factor

However, the migration, whilst successful, did result in some change management factors that required investment. Kosturos said he underestimated how much time would need to be spent with staff, and putting systems in place, to ensure that people got used to the new software. He added:

Change management was the hardest part, with helping employees. Kronos used to be a four letter word in our company, and then all of a sudden on day one of Oracle, they were saying ‘where's Kronos’? I just didn't really appreciate how hard it is for people to learn a new system and to do things in a different way.

Two and a half years later, Twenty-Nine Palms is much more proficient in its use of Oracle, thanks to Kosturos and his teams putting in place standard operating procedures (SOPs) and giving people time and the space to adapt. He said:

The key way we overcame that was just time, people just need time to learn the system and feel comfortable with it. Be we also really put the onus on the team members to develop SOPs with screenshots.

So, for example, we have multiple controllers, and we told them ‘for all your staff’s day-to day aspects we want to see a snapshot SOP in the system with where to go, what to do and how to process something’. Once we had those, it was a very quick turnaround of the lower level staff feeling a little more comfortable in the system. And that only took a few weeks for them to put those together.

Now the change management aspect is largely resolved, Twenty-Nine Palms finally has a consolidated view of its enterprise and government operations, with financials rolling up and its HR team able to see all employees across the system.

It’s also changing and standardizing its processes, adopting best practices, and Kosturos said it is enabling the Tribe to think in ways it wasn’t able to previously. Data is also a key aspect of this. He said:

Now we're thinking of how we can capture data? Data that we previously discarded or didn’t pay attention to, how can we capture it? How can we analyze it? How can it help us be a little better? Using different fields, whether it's in procurement or chartered accounts, to capture things in a different way, which we weren't doing before. So it's helping us a lot.

Twenty-Nine Palms has also increased its employee base from 600 to 850 people over this time - and a key benefit of the project has been that staff feel more empowered. Kosturos said:

We're treating this more like a living breathing thing that we can adapt and change. So now we're telling staff, if you see something in the system that's holding you down, or where you want to update it, let us know and we can fix things. There's a little bit more ownership and empowerment with the AP clerks.

The more we can empower the staff with things like how the software is adaptable, the more they're just open to share other things in general. It really helps us grow junior people and make them feel like they can communicate and not feel shy. It’s hard to do and a lot harder than I would have imagined. But this is just another step in pushing them in that direction.

Having the standardized e-workflows also means that it's much easier to promote from within and further the careers of junior staff. Prior to the introduction of Oracle, Twenty-Nine Palms struggled to do this because the learning curve with the green screen systems and all the disparate operations meant there was a higher barrier to entry. With the consistent processes and similar feel of all the Fusion apps, Kusturos said junior staff are able to go and get experience in a variety of different business segments.

Overall, whilst Twenty-Nine Palms is a ‘small’ customer in terms of Oracle’s install base, Kosturos said it has helped the Tribe support its future goals. He added:

It's really helped us in a broad way to do things faster, more efficiently, with better separation of duties. I think we're in a good spot, our auditors feel a little better, and I feel a little better that our Chairman knows that.

TWENTYNINE PALMS — A fire that started in a car burned spread to two houses and displaced two Twentynine Palms families Thursday morning, June 29.

An 80-year-old woman, her daughter and four grandchildren — three boys ages 19, 9 and 7 and a 5-year-old girl — were affected by the fire. A tragedy was averted after three people reentered the house to retrieve the youngest daughter, who had been left behind in the confusion.

The fire struck at 6:37 a.m. in a car parked at a house in the 72300 block of Sunnyslope Drive. It spread to a fence and then to the house next door, where it did extensive damage and forced family members to flee.

“It’s gone,” Yvonne Gomez, the children’s mother, said as family members loaded a pickup truck with clothing and other items salvaged from the home later Thursday. She said she was not certain where the family would stay.

After she and her family escaped, she realized her 5-year-old daughter was still in the house.

“I got my kids out and then I realized my baby was still there,” she said. She and two others reentered the building to get the girl out.

She said a fire captain on the scene tried to stop her from going back into the burning building to retrieve her daughter.

County fire Battalion Chief Mike McClintock said a firefighter was told that no one was in the house.

They were fighting the fire from the outside as it burned two structures and the car when they learned that a member of the family was not accounted for.

Following regulations, he said, the fire captain went to get personnel to enter and rescue the child when family members reentered the building and brought the child out.

They were lucky, he said, in that the flames were confined to the attic area.

“This happened in three seconds,” he said.

According to McClintock, firefighters were initially dispatched at 6:38 a.m. to a vehicle fire that was upgraded to a structure fire while they were en route.

“Prior to our arrival, a sheriff’s deputy in the area visualized the smoke, arrived and notified the residents of the home catching fire, assisting them with evacuation,” he said.

Firefighters from the downtown Twentynine Palms fire station found multiple vehicles and one home well involved in flames and an additional home catching fire.

As more crews arrived, firefighters worked to suppress the fires in both homes, entering to search each house and fight fires in the attic space.

An active gas leak and affected power lines complicated their efforts, McClintock said. Ultimately, the fire was knocked down in about 40 minutes.

One person was taken to the hospital with minor injuries related to smoke inhalation.

The fire heavily damaged two single-family homes and destroyed two passenger vehicles and two motorcycles, McClintock said.

Between the two homes, five adults and four children were displaced. The Red Cross was requested to help them with shelter.

The fire remains under investigation by the San Bernardino County sheriff’s and fire departments.

Christina Dozer, a neighbor and friend of the family, is collecting donations of clothing, including shirts, tops, pants and shoes.

To make a donation, contact Dozer at (760) 401-9401 or via Facebook.

MARINE CORPS AIR GROUND COMBAT CENTER TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. -- U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Benson Yu is a 0621 Radio Operator participating in the Marine Air Ground Task Force Distributed Maneuver Exercise (MDMX), at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, California, as a member of 3rd Low Altitude Air Defense (LAAD) Battalion, Marine Air Control Group 38.

A first-generation American, Yu is the first Marine in his family. "I joined the Marine Corps to be more independent," said the 21-year-old Monterey Park, California native. "I'm the first one in my family to serve. I see it as a way to give back to the country that took my family in."

Yu’s parents immigrated from China to California, where he was born.

"I'm proud of the culture my parents raised me in. But as far as mission accomplishment, I'm first and foremost a Marine."

Today, Yu fills a critical role within the LAAD community. "My job is to enable LAAD gunners to communicate with higher command and all the other agencies that we work with. I'm always looking for the most efficient way to use the radios," Yu said. He sees the radio as one of the most powerful weapons on the battlefield, "You can't coordinate fires without radios. I'm proud of my MOS (military occupational specialty).”

Executing aerial defense with the FIM-92 stinger missile for over four decades, 3rd LAAD Battalion is adapting to meet potential future threats outlined in Force Design 2030. Based on Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, 3rd LAAD provides close-in, low altitude, surface-to-air weapons fires in defense of Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) assets.

The battalion established a new battery in November 2022 and is integrating new technologies, including the Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System (LMADIS), which enables 3rd LAAD to detect, track, identify, and defeat aerial threats. Additionally, the new capabilities will enable expeditionary counter-unmanned aerial systems operations in austere and isolated environments. During MDMX, the unit practiced working alongside adjacent Marine units.

MDMX is a three-day maneuver exercise that incorporates ground, air, and logistics operations. The training tests units' abilities to conduct combined-arms operations in a distributed environment to seize key terrain and set favorable conditions for the Joint Force to deliver decisive strikes at the time and place of its choosing.

MDMX is one exercise of the Marine Corps' Service Level Training Exercises (SLTE). A series of five exercises, SLTE is designed to prepare the MAGTF to respond to crises and conflicts around the globe by increasing their ability to integrate actions across the full range of military operations.

For Yu, MDMX is crucial training that keeps his LAAD Marines combat-ready: "This exercise helps us become more proficient at our jobs. Hard, realistic training gives us a taste of what it'll be like when we're actually out there fighting."

One battle drill 3rd LAAD executes during MDMX is support to forward arming and refueling points (FARPs).

"We're practicing to offload a CH-53 and roll right into an air defense for a FARP," Yu said.

Part of the Marine Corps' modernization efforts include developing tactics, techniques, and procedures for logistics in a contested environment. LAAD's unique surface-to-air fires capabilities establish force protection for vital assets and enable logistics Marines to safely conduct aircraft refuel and resupply operations.

The result of impeccable MAGTF integration, Yu describes the FARP experience as "fitting in."

"This gives us the opportunity to not only practice our own MOS, but also see how other units work, and show how we fit in as LAAD in their mission," Yu said.

The Marine Corps is most lethal when its people and assets embrace their fit into the Marine Air Ground Task Force.