The Town of Miami Lakes is known for its beautiful tree lined streets, parks, and green spaces. With a commitment to become the most uniformly beautiful municipality in South Florida, high quality grounds and landscape maintenance services are essential for reaching this goal.

Over the past five 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, each contract included a performance incentive for a contract time extension for vendors that met performance standards.

Under these contracts, instead of a monthly flat fee, the vendor is paid only for work that meets the required performance standards. Contracts for grounds maintenance services are awarded based on the character and type of work required in certain areas rather than simply awarding all parks to one vendor and right-of-way medians to another. To receive payment for services rendered, the contractor must maintain the awarded areas at a specific quality standard, which is established for each area in the contract. 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 performance-based contracts, the Town awards contracts to three vendors for each area. Services are rendered by the primary vendor for each area for the life of the contract, unless performance issues make it untenable to continue with the primary. In the event the primary vendor is unable to perform to contractual standards, the Town will terminate its contract with the primary vendor and move on to the secondary vendor for the applicable area.

Since this approach has been implemented, the Town has released two vendors for non-performance and one vendor lost the opportunity to increase their contract time by several months. This will be the third set of performance based contracts awarded by the Town.

The Town issued Invitation to Bid (“ITB”) 2017-23 for Grounds Maintenance for Pocket Parks and ROW Medians on February 17, 2017. The solicitation was advertised in the Miami Daily Business Review, on the Town's website, DemandStar and the Government Center Lobby. In addition, Procurement notified three hundred fifty-nine (359) potential vendors through DemandStar and sent notice via email to thirteen (13) interested vendors servicing the area.

Prospective Bidders were required to possess a minimum of three (3) years' experience performing landscape and grounds maintenance services under its current business name and ownership performing contracts with similar size, scope, and complexity, and to provide verifiable client references demonstrating successful completion of at least three (3) such projects within the past five (5) years.

The Bid Opening for this solicitation was held on March 22, 2017, we received six (6) bids from the following bidders:
1. Superior
2. SFM
3. BrightView
4. GreenSource
5. Reynelvy Design Landscaping (“Reynelvy”)*
6. VisualScape
See attached Bid Tabulation
*Deemed Nonresponsive

In its due diligence review, Procurement determined that five of the six submittals were responsive to the solicitation. Reynelvy's submittal was deemed nonresponsive because it did not provide client references for projects of similar size, scope, or complexity as the Town's grounds maintenance project. Their client references were for projects that ranged from $7,720 to $28,000, which are projects of significantly smaller scope and complexity. That coupled with their low employee count lead to Procurement's conclusion that Reynelvy neither had the experience nor the man power to meet the stringent performance standards established in the Town's grounds maintenance contract.

Procurement reviewed the remaining Bidders to determine whether they were responsible to perform the work. One Bidder, Superior, has had performance issues under two previous contracts with the Town. Superior was a contractor for the Town's previous grounds maintenance contract executed in 2012. Due to difficulties in meeting the performance standards outlined in the contract, the Town had to issue a Stop Work Order to Superior on February 1, 2014. Similarly, the Town by mutual agreement released Superior of its obligations under our Tree Trimming contract as well. The release occurred after Superior approached the Town and explained it was losing money performing under the contract. The Town decided to honor their request to be released from the contract, provided they continued servicing the Town long enough to secure a new vendor. The Town found a new vendor for Tree Trimming services and subsequently released Superior from the contract. Despite these issues, the Town has not considered these problems egregious enough to debar Superior from contracting with the Town. Superior still does business with the Town and is presently the Town's vendor responsible for maintaining FDOT landscape areas within the Town.

Considering the past performance issues, Procurement called Superior for a meeting to address some of the Town's concerns with awarding the new contract. At this meeting, Superior was given a deadline to submit a detailed and specific action plan, which would explain how the company planned to meet the performance standards contained within the contract, and how their practices have changed, if at all, from their practices under the previous contract. Superior's first action plan was rejected for lack of specificity. However, their second action plan was accepted by Procurement and is attached to this Memorandum.

With the submission of their action plan, Procurement has determined Superior is responsible to perform the work, and therefore, is the lowest responsive and responsible Bidder for Items 1 and 4. That being stated, it has been strongly expressed to Superior that the Town will have two additional vendors under Contract, ready to perform in their awarded areas if they fail to meet the standards and obligations outlined under this new Contract. Because there are two contractors ready to begin work should Superior fail to perform, we are comfortable with recommending awarding contracts to them as the lowest Bidder for Items 1 and 4.

As for the remaining Bidders, all were determined to be the lowest responsive and responsible Bidders for their respective areas. We found no significant issues during its review and has determined their prices to be fair and reasonable.