Miami Lakes Optimist Park and Royal Oaks Park are two of the Town's largest parks. With more than forty-one acres of green space, both parks require specialized athletic field care to maintain their green, healthy, and neat appearance. Instead of in-housing the maintenance, the Town hires contractors to perform grounds maintenance services at both parks. The services consist of mowing, edging, trimming, maintaining shrubs, hedges, and plants, fertilizing, weed control, maintaining irrigation, pest identification/control, maintaining athletic fields, and supervision of personnel.

Over the past six years, the Town moved towards a performance-based contracting approach, especially in the areas of landscape maintenance, to ensure its green spaces enjoy a high-quality look year-round. This innovative approach has resulted in an increase in overall quality in our landscape and vendor performance. In addition, this approach affords the Town the flexibility to improve our level of service should additional funds be budgeted in subsequent fiscal years.

Under these contracts, instead of a monthly flat fee, the vendor is paid only for work that meets the required performance standards. To receive payment for services rendered, the contractor must maintain the awarded areas at a specific quality standard, which is established for each park in the contract. The Town uses a Quality Assurance & Surveillance Program (“QASP”) to conduct routine and surprise inspections to assess whether contractors continue to meet performance standards. Contractors that fail to meet performance standards do not receive compensation for their associated tasks along with an inspection fee assessment and lose potential months that could be added to their contracts. For each month the contractor meets performance standards, an additional month is added to the term of the contract, providing an incentive for contractors to maintain grounds above performance standards.

The Town issued Request for Proposals (”RFP”) 2018-16 for Grounds Maintenance Services for Miami Lakes Optimist Park and Royal Oaks Park on April 2, 2018. The RFP was advertised online via two public bidding websites, DemandStar and Public Purchase, and was physically posted in the Government Center Lobby. Solicitation notifications were sent to 375 vendors, of which 26 downloaded solicitation documents for this RFP.

To qualify for award, prospective Proposers were required to:

1. Hold a current Landscape License/Certification issued by Miami-Dade County;
2. Possess a minimum of five (5) years' experience performing grounds maintenance services under its current business name and ownership; and
3. Provide verifiable client references demonstrating satisfactory work on at least three (3) grounds/athletic field maintenance contracts of similar size, scope, and complexity within the last seven (7) years.

On the date of the proposal deadline, April 17, 2018, we received two (2) proposals from the following Proposers:

An Evaluation Committee was appointed, comprised of the following members:

1. Jeremy Bajdaun, Parks & Athletics Manager, Town of Miami Lakes
2. Tony Lopez, Chief of Operations, Town of Miami Lakes
3. Omar Luna, Recreation Director, City of Miami Springs
4. Paulette Murphy, Director of Parks & Recreation, City of Miami Gardens

Procurement performed a due diligence review of the proposals for responsiveness and found that review of each proposal did not reveal any material defects in the proposal, nor in the Proposers' qualifications. Each Proposer has been in business for more than five (5) years, they are appropriately licensed to do the work, and provided references for at least three contracts of similar size, scope, and complexity. Procurement did not find any issues that would indicate any Proposer was incapable of performing the services.

The Evaluation Committee was provided the responsive proposals and met on April 18, 2018, to evaluate and rank the proposals. At the conclusion of this meeting, the Evaluation Committee moved to establish the following ranking:

1. GreenSource – 417.76
2. BrightView – 417

The rankings were established by utilizing the Evaluation Committee's point allocations for the technical portion of the response and adding points based on an equation using both Proposers' total bid price. Due to the small difference in total points, the Evaluation Committee considered awarding contracts for each park based on which Proposer submitted the lowest price for each park. In this case, BrightView submitted the lowest price for Miami Lakes Optimist Park at $455,250.00 and Green Source submitted the lowest price for Royal Oaks Park at $283,719.30. The Evaluation Committee determined that awarding contracts for each park separately represented the best value to the Town.

The adopted budget for fiscal year 2017-2018 includes $822,500 for grounds maintenance services in both parks. Of that amount, $291,500.00 is budgeted for Royal Oaks Park and $531,000.00 is budgeted for Miami Lakes Optimist Park. GreenSource proposed an annual price of $283,719.30, which is $7,780.70 within budget and BrightView proposed an annual price of $455,250.00, which is $75,750.00 within budget. However, a portion of the remaining budget for Miami Lakes Optimist Park may be necessary for custodial services, which should be awarded at the June Town Council Meeting. Current custodial services for Miami Lakes Optimist Park cost the Town $14,700 annually, though this is expected to increase in the next custodial services solicitation.