BCC Minutes 10/03/2023 WOctober 3, 2023
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MINUTES OF THE COLLIER COUNTY
BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS WORKSHOP
Naples, Florida, October 3, 2023
LET IT BE REMEMBERED that the Collier County Board of County
Commissioners, in and for the County of Collier, having conducted business herein,
met on this date at 9 a.m. in Workshop Session in Administrative Building F, 3rd Floor,
Collier County Government Center, Naples, with the following members present:
CHAIRMAN: Rick LoCastro
Chris Hall
Dan Kowal
William L. McDaniel Jr.
Burt L. Saunders
ALSO PRESENT:
Amy Patterson, County Manager
Ed Finn, Deputy County Manager
Jay Ahmad, Director, Transportation Engineering Department
Crystal Kinzel, Clerk of Courts
Jeffrey Klatzkow, County Attorney
Tanya Williams, Director, Public Services
Troy Miller, Communications & Customer Relations
COLLIER COUNTY
Board of County Commissioners
WORKSHOP AGENDA
Board of County Commission Chambers
Collier County Government Center
3299 Tamiami Trail East, 3rd Floor
Naples, FL 34112
October 03, 2023
9:00 AM
Commissioner Rick LoCastro, District 1; - Chair
Commissioner Chris Hall, District 2; - Vice Chair
Commissioner Burt Saunders, District 3
Commissioner Dan Kowal, District 4; - CRAB Co -Chair
Commissioner William L. McDaniel, Jr., District 5; - CRAB Co -Chair
Notice: All persons wishing to speak must turn in a speaker slip. Each speaker will receive no more than three (3) minutes.
Collier County Ordinance No. 2003-53 as amended by Ordinance 2004-05 and 2007-24, requires that all lobbyists shall,
before engaging in any lobbying activities (including but not limited to, addressing the Board of County Commissioners),
register with the Clerk to the Board at the Board Minutes and Records Department.
1. PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE
2. WORKSHOP TOPICS
2.1. Transportation, Public Utilities, and Facilities Presentation (26782)
2.2. Productivity Committee Presentation (26783)
3. PUBLIC COMMENTS
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Inquiries concerning changes to the Board's Agenda should be made to the County Manager's Office at
252-8383.
October 3, 2023
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Anyone who needs a verbatim record of the meeting may request a video recording from
the Collier County Communications & Customer Relations Department or view it online.
Chairman LoCastro called the meeting to order at 9 a.m.
1. Pledge of Allegiance
Chairman LoCastro asked County Attorney Jeff Klatzkow to lead everyone in the pledge of
Allegiance.
2. Workshop Topics
Ms. Patterson welcomed commissioners to the workshop and said Jay Ahmad will provide a
transportation engineering perspective on in-house versus outsourced engineering and CEI
(Construction Engineering and Inspection) services.
2.1. Transportation, Public Utilities, and Facilities Presentation (26782)
Chairman LoCastro told Mr. Ahmad that his work and work by his team are appreciated,
and the county is fortunate to have him.
Mr. Ahmad told the BCC:
He spent his career on outsourcing engineering.
He introduced his team, Marlene Messam, Matt McLean, Matt Thomas, John
McCormick and other experts in different fields of utility. We rely on each other for
all functions. Transportation needs utilities and certain things from construction, etc.
We do in-house and outsource all the time. Vanderbilt Beach Road Extension, all
CEI functions, with the exception of verification testing, are done by the in-house
team of engineers, project managers and inspectors. It’s the largest construction
project in the county’s history and it’s being done in-house to save. Cost was a factor
in doing it in-house.
He will cover three topics: Capital Improvement Projects, In-house Design Traffic
and Safety Improvements and Construction Engineering Inspections (CEI).
Capital Improvement Projects involve Vanderbilt-Beach Road Extension, Veterans
Memorial, Collier Boulevard, large projects on Wilson Boulevard, mostly roadways
and bridges and some utilities.
In-house, the design. We procure a consultant for the engineering portion.
In-house Design Traffic and Safety Improvements. Our small in-house team designs
traffic and safety improvements, such as a left-turn lane or a right-turn lane. To get
direct and quick construction, we don’t go through the procurement process. We
have in-house engineers who sign and seal design plans. The section doesn’t need
many disciplines, but we have a small section that has those functions.
Construction Engineering Inspections, CEI. Vanderbilt Beach Road Extension has a
team of seven who do project management and the CEI.
Consulting and how we decide when to outsource. We recently finished Veterans
Memorial. It’s a roadway to the new Aubrey Rogers High School. It was needed for
that purpose and serves Secoya Reserve and the elementary school.
This capital project was budgeted for about $10 million dollars. It has intersection
traffic and bridges.
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We went out to bid for a consultant. Supervisor Marlene Messam leads the team of
five licensed project managers or engineers who do the design or procure it.
We’re governed in project management by the CCNA (Consultant Competitive
Negotiation Act) in designing and meeting consultants. The CCNA stipulates that
you can’t just go and bid out consulting services. You must go through a
procurement process and a ranking. We advertise with an RFP (Request for
Proposals). We get a ranking and come to the BCC for approval and you allow us to
negotiate.
Once we have a contract, we bring it to the board for approval.
We have a scope of services in the contract. What are we buying for a design? We
have to design a highway and get it through several stages: 30% public involvement
and 60%, apply for a permit, and if there’s a need for right-of-way acquisition, we go
through that process. This team gets 100% permitted all the right-of-way acquisition
through a combination or through negotiations, and send it to construction.
The construction team picks it up and the CEI hands it over to a project manager
(called a handshake) in CEI and they take on the construction management and
inspection. That’s done by in-house or CEI, in-house outsourcing.
Our five-year work program is close to $500 million worth of projects countywide in
each district, including Wilson, Everglade, Goodlette, etc. This becomes the basis of
our work program and what we do, finding consultants to design projects.
Project managers schedule projects for all phases using Microsoft Project to
determine when each event occurs and how long it takes. The contract stipulates that
a designer would have a time period, such as 1-1½ years.
Permitting and rights-of-way usually are for the duration and that takes longer. Then
we send it out to construction. We take it to delivery and production.
For Vanderbilt Beach Road Extension Phase 2, it takes the project from where Phase
1 ends at 16th to just east of Everglades Boulevard. It’s about $20 million in
construction value. It has one bridge that’s similar to the Phase 1 design.
We recently went through negotiations with a consultant. When we do an RFP, in
every proposal that we request, a consultant or several consultants submits what
they’re staffing, how they’ll do it and the critical issues.
Kimley-Horn was selected and we negotiated a contract that we’ll hopefully bring to
the board at the end of October or early November. This is the expertise required to
do that project, the highways, utilities, environmental, drainage, traffic signals,
maintenance of traffic, permitting and surveying. All these services are a system of
engineering expertise needed to produce this project.
You can’t complete a project without surveying or knowing whether it’s
geotechnical for the roadway and bridges, or a highway engineer, bridge engineer or
a permitting guy.
Even with such a large firm, the expertise isn’t always enough. They still need sub-
consultants, geotechnical, surveying and traffic aspects.
If we decide to insource this project, you need the expertise of civil engineers, bridge
engineers, highway, traffic, geotechnical, utilities, transportation planners, surveyors
and engineers to service underground utilities to find out what’s underneath our
existing infrastructure. You also need drainage, landscaping and maybe others.
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We go through this often. Cost is a factor but it’s not the only factor. There’s also
liability.
For example, the 2018 collapse of the Florida International University pedestrian
bridge. The university was planning to have the bridge span the roadway and,
unfortunately, there was a design error. The designer hired by the university made an
error in calculating the structure. As it was being constructed, it collapsed and six
people died – five were on the roadway and one was working on the bridge; 10 were
injured badly and some are still injured. Eight vehicles were crushed.
If you decide to take on engineering services, we’re a big county so there’s liability.
If it’s a small engineer, it may not be a big settlement, but if you go after a county, it
may be a serious issue, so liability should be a consideration. Do we have in-house
engineers and carry on the design engineering of what they design and sign and seal?
In March, we will decide to go with 2% above last year’s budget. Your policy
dictates trickle down to divisions and departments to ensure they live within the
policy you set. If you set 2%, we make sure that policy is followed.
Lately, the policy was not to increase staffing, so that’s an issue. Trying to find
engineers in this market is extremely difficult. It’s not an easy task and you can’t just
put an ad in the paper or in national magazines.
Engineering professionals are not easy to find. Marlene had a vacancy for over two
years and required bridge experts. We cannot find engineers to come here for
multiple reasons, including housing, affordability or we’re not paying enough. These
reasons contribute to a decision about insourcing.
You can’t do insourcing if you can’t find the staff. Flexibility is also a factor.
Consultants have more flexibility for a schedule. If you give me 22 projects, the
number in my five-year program, and you want to insource and not use consultants,
unless you have that kind of staffing, you’re going to start lining up projects or finish
two at a time, and it’ll take a long time.
With consultants, you have the flexibility to hire 22 consultants, and they’ll be
working on your projects.
Quality. There’s competition between consultants. A selection committee chooses
them based on qualifications. They compete for quality. But quality on a prior
project can become a factor to the selection committee, such as many change orders.
Resources. Consultants have ability to recruit expertise. They have international
companies and multiple offices. They could have more expertise in one office or
another to rely on.
Innovation. The private sector has more experience with special projects. For the
bridge at Golden Gate Parkway over Airport Road, you wouldn’t have all the in-
house resources to do something like that.
Maintenance. A designer must look at the life cycle of a project. That’s a big factor
in deciding outsourcing and insourcing.
Mr. Ahmad detailed other counties that outsourced or did work in-house:
Collier County has a small in-house design team just for engineering services, less
than 2%.
Lee County has no in-house design team.
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Broward has a large population and does about 5% in-house.
Palm Beach does 5% in-house.
Highland County, which has a small population, does almost all projects in-house,
90%. They have teams and their projects are smaller, similar to our team’s work on
left- and right-turn lanes, shoulder improvements, etc.
Monroe, Hendry, and Charlotte counties have no staff for insourcing of design (not
CEI), so that goes out to a consultant.
FDOT has 80 people on staff in six teams in District 1. They outsource a lot of the
expertise within their team. They do 5-10% in-house.
Chairman LoCastro said:
We’ve all pledged to dig deep into the county structure and departments to ensure
taxpayers are getting the biggest bang for their buck.
We only do 2% in-house. If we have people with high levels of expertise, such as
designers, architects, engineers, have we always been at less than 2%?
With all the expertise we have on staff, he thought it would all be in-house.
Sometimes it might be smarter not to do it in-house.
When did we last look at staff to ensure the makeup and expertise matches this less
than 2%?
Even though Highland is much smaller, they probably have a different staff makeup
because if they’re doing 90% in-house. They must have a certain level of expertise.
98% of the time we go elsewhere and probably pay a premium. Sometimes after
hiring a contractor, they come back a month later and say it’s going to cost more
because they took a deeper dive and need another $800,000.
There are times bills grow. We sit here and are surprised it couldn’t have been taken
care of in-house.
If it couldn’t, do we have people sitting in offices with deep expertise that are being
used a lot less than they used to be?
He doesn’t want to find we’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on staff
who have the expertise to oversee a contractor, but they’re not doing 90%, as
Highland is.
We might have too much overlap, which costs money.
What are your thoughts?
Mr. Ahmad said we are having a conversation about that. This is just the design portion of
the presentation. For CEI, we do a lot more than 2%. For design functions, we have leading
experts in highway, traffic, highway design, bridges, utilities. We have five project
managers who manage the workload. The surtax added $260 million worth of projects with
no additional staff. If you take those four experts and give them a computer and AutoCAD
software to start designing, they will do the design. But you still need staff to manage the
rest of the projects. We kept the staff lean on purpose, with just enough to manage the
workload under the policy you gave us.
Chairman LoCastro said so they have the experience to do it from start to finish, but they
can’t drop everything to do that one project, so we get more bang for the buck through their
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expertise, but it’s being utilized to oversee, ensure checks and balances, make sure we’re not
getting ripped off by a contractor, etc.? That’s the answer he was hoping to hear. We’re not
fat in any one area, but we’re dynamic enough with a staff with expertise that can monitor
many contracts, especially recently.
Mr. Ahmad replied that:
Over 22 projects are being worked on, other than what’s in construction.
If you manage the expertise or if you need to add expertise to deliver in-house
design projects, you probably will need 100 or more staffers, not the five you have.
These are samples of projects we outsource; it doesn’t include all projects.
The consultant tells us in the RFP the man hours needed to produce the project. For
Pine Ridge, the consultant proposes 15 people. On other projects, it’s much higher,
because there’s project development, environmental and specialty expertise. Not all
are on the project full time. They go in and out of a project as expertise is needed.
In one case, the consultants proposed 138 people and we are paying for hours that
deliver those projects based on what we thought was needed.
During negotiations, we determine the consultant’s fee. We’re all experts and we’ve
done this work. The process strictly follows Florida Department of Transportation
regulations. We decide what we’re buying and the scope of services to the last detail.
We set it aside and negotiate the scope with the consultants. Then we go into
negotiations separately.
Staff determines what we think are the hours needed and the cost it will entail for
those hours or project scope. The consultant also does that independently. Then we
separately submit that to Procurement, which calls each of us and we look at the
numbers. Sometimes we are far behind, sometimes three times and sometimes we’re
equal. That’s how we negotiate.
If we are confident about our numbers, we’ve broken negotiations several times
because we can’t agree on a number. We ensure taxpayers get their money’s worth.
For example, on Airport Road, they wanted $3.6 million and we were confident that
it should be less than $1.7 million or $1.8 million. We stuck to our ground and went
to the second-ranked consultant, essentially firing the highest-ranked consultant, and
we got that $1.8 million or $1.9 million we believed the project was worth.
It isn’t just finding a consultant. We know this business. We’ve got leading experts
in different fields who can tell us what it takes for a certain task.
We recommend the board continues outsourcing this kind of work level because you
would have to add a lot of FTEs and expertise to accomplish in-housing projects.
Liability. Staff needs offices, computers and vehicles. Trying to hire one engineer is
very difficult. Trying to hire 100 will be impossible.
Consultants are now buying consultants. Recently, Hole Montes was acquired and
Stantec bought WilsonMiller. They’re buying consulting firms because they can’t
find staff. They buy and get all the staffing that comes with that consultant.
It’s a serious challenge here to hire several engineers and your policy is to keep
staffing low.
You have the surtax and if you hire staff and change your mind or a different board
decides not to do a surtax, you have to keep all those employees busy for the next
projects. If there’s no workflow after that, you’ve got a problem.
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We’ve had layoffs in the past, in 2010. We had to tell engineers we have no work for
them.
He asked if there were questions before he proceeded to the in-house process.
Chairman LoCastro replied that:
When it comes to outsourcing, his biggest concern is to make sure taxpayers get the
biggest bang for their buck, being on time and on budget.
During his first term, they had several competitive bids. We went with the No. 1
company and were happy about the competitive price. About a month later, the same
contractor was here asking for way more money, so that might not have been the
most competitive company.
The five that dropped out might have said, “That was our price. We would have
never asked for anything more.” Sometimes that can’t be avoided. They may dig in
an area and find something, but there were times when the verbiage wasn’t
impressive. They didn’t do a full analysis and now they need another X hundreds of
thousands of dollars. Then we look back at the spreadsheet that showed all the
people who bid on it and they barely got the contract because they were a little bit
cheaper or maybe had a slightly bad reputation, but in the end we’re paying way
more than the next four contractors who didn’t get the contract.
He wants to make sure we’re always looking out for add-ons and cost overruns.
The Marco Island Executive Airport project was in his district. When the bid went to
that company, everybody was patting themselves on the back. It ended up being
many years late, ended up in court and settled for hundreds of thousands of taxpayer
dollars.
He understands the advantage of outsourcing, but in this time of tight budgets, we
have to ensure we’re using all the expertise possible on staff to not only make sure
we pick the right contractor but hold them accountable.
He wouldn’t think twice about denying a contractor who wanted another $800,000.
You probably should have sharpened your pencil before you made a bid. We’ll
expect it in full for the price you bid. Sometimes there are loopholes or fine print in
the contract that won’t allow us to do that, but we could tighten that up.
Several times he’s been told contractors are making a ton of money off the county
and the county should do its homework. He hopes we learned our lesson.
What are your thoughts?
Mr. Ahmad replied that:
He’s talking about bidding and contracting. What the chair has talked about so far is
hiring a consultant, but they’re related and we’re paying them.
The design aspect dictates what gets built.
The best designers have looked at and minimized change orders or claims. You hire
the best designer and they design the best product. Most likely, you’ll end up with
fewer change orders – maybe not completely because change orders manage change.
We take money from our allowance or contingency in our contract, so it’s a
transparent process.
Sometimes we make a change order to take the money and put it into the project to
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do the activities we need to do. Sometimes we want something different, or there
may be a change or an error. Change orders happen for multiple reasons.
Contracting is by law. We wish we could hire our own people, or people we know.
He wishes Thomas Ware would bid on every project, but we end up with whoever is
the lowest bidder, unless they’re non-responsive, they missed something, have a
history of bad performance, or were banned from other counties, etc.
A discussion ensued and the following points were made:
The county is doing a better job of catching things, but we always can do better.
It’s very difficult to kick out a low bidder. We’ve had contractors we knew were bad
but they were $1-2 million below the second bidder and we have to make a decision.
Commissioners don’t have the latitude to make that decision.
If we find a contractor who is $2 million less than others, but they have three
lawsuits on the East Coast, what prevents us from saying, “If it were my house and
my money, this is the worst way to go. It’s not a good investment.” Our job is to
manage taxpayer dollars.”
If a contractor had three lawsuits, a court would have to adjudicate whether they
committed fraud, etc. You definitely cannot sign them on.
Many times, contractors come in with a low bid and hope they can drive us crazy
with change orders. Then they end up with the price they wanted and we spent $4
million, not $2 million.
Sometimes what they ask for in change orders or additional funds supersedes the
contractors who lost the bid and who may have asked for nothing more.
Chairman LoCastro asked what the board’s recourse is if we have a contractor with a bad
reputation or whose prior work for the county was less than impressive. Do we have the
latitude as commissioners to get involved and listen to staff and say we’re about to be forced
into a contractor that we already know we’re going to have issues with?
Attorney Klatzkow said if you have a good faith belief and staff gave you reasons to make
a decision not to go with the contractor, you’ve got the ability to do that. The contract holds
the ability to bring a lawsuit against the contractor. He’s not worried about a contractor
suing the county. You have that latitude.
Chairman LoCastro said he’s hearing that we’re never forced to do almost anything. There
are times where our hands are tied, but we might spend less in a lawsuit fighting the
contractor we’re brushing off than taking that contractor on and in the end spending millions
more, ending up in court, settling out of court, where in the end, we’ll take on the legal
argument to not select them if we have a rationale.
Mr. Ahmad said we do that and have done that in the past, but we brought contracts and
asked that they not be rewarded. We go through a process with Procurement. We call
references and the design engineer opines on their qualifications and bids.
Commissioner Hall said there’s a balance in what you’re saying. We can’t do it all in-
house and shouldn’t do it all CEI. It seems the county is a scapegoat. It’s a way out for a
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contractor who doesn’t get it right. They get our backs against a wall, come back and ask for
more money. Are there ways we can stop that? Can we hold contractors accountable?
Attorney Klatzkow said that’s not what’s happening. It’s not the county’s experience with
contractors. There are good ones and bad ones, but problems are usually due to Southwest
Florida’s labor pool being very tight now. We’ll be running a job and someone will offer
those workers double what they’re making here and the job site is then empty. It’s no
different from what private companies are experiencing. There are material and labor
shortages now.
Commissioner Hall said that knowing there’s a labor issue and material shortage,
contractors who bid the jobs know that, so where is the accountability that we as the county
can hold them to the line? We shouldn’t take the brunt of it if somebody’s bidding for a job
knowing there’s a material shortage.
Attorney Klatzkow said we have liquidated damages in all contracts if it’s a question of
bad faith. There aren’t many contractors who bid for Collier County work because it’s not
easy working with all our rules and regulations. Payment also can be an issue. We have a
clerk who does a fine job, which ensures everything is valid. Our experiences are no
different from anyone else’s.
Mr. Ahmad said he takes responsibility for accountability. His team does the CEI. A
change order that’s submitted to us is not automatically reviewed and approved. The
overwhelming majority are denied and at the end, Jeff ends up with a lawsuit filed by the
contractor, who says we denied this and that, and we either settle or go to court. We are the
eyes out there in construction, the project manager. He’ll explain it in the next section, the
CEI. This section was about hiring a designer for a project to go to construction.
A discussion ensued and the following points were made:
Paying to add staff to get double the savings is worth it. There’s a balance.
We can use in-house staff with expertise and hire those we don’t have, instead of
hiring everybody.
Collier has a CEI program and saves about 50% for every five people we hire. With
inspectors, you save $1.5-$2 million.
That savings assumes there’s a flow of projects, but if you have minimal projects in
the pipeline, your savings are all gone.
We once loaned the CEI team to Stormwater for the project west of Goodlette when
we didn’t have much work lined up. It becomes a staffing calculation. Is it worth
hiring all these employees to do all the projects? It’s a balancing act.
Collier’s housing market is extremely expensive. We’ve hired engineers from
northern states and when they come down and start looking at our housing market, a
one-bedroom apartment is over $2,000, they can’t afford to live in Naples. They end
up moving into north counties, driving distances and change their mind.
Pay is another factor. We have a minimum and maximum in negotiations. Amy
Lyberg and our county manager’s team have been great when we have the right
candidate. We’ve offered salaries higher than the 10% we were originally willing to
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go up to in an effort to attract talent.
A project manager out of college now would be paid $45,000-$65,000.
A PE with experience is hard to hire for less than $120,000. Even then, we’re not
finding them.
The CCNA (Consultants Competitive Negotiation Act) statute makes it hard to
conduct business. We’re hamstrung by the CCNA.
There was an effort to put a pricing strategy into the statute, but it failed and only
qualifications can be considered. Pricing would give us latitude.
Can staff work with the Clerk’s Office to better define payment processes and how
we pay contractors? Collier has a horrible reputation largely due to our Clerk of
Courts.
We have price components that are put into contracts that come to us on the premise
that they’re not going to be paid in a timely manner. We could adjust the processes.
We shouldn’t withhold the entire $50,000 payment if just $10,000 is in question
because all their Is aren’t dotted and the Ts aren’t crossed. We should pay the
$40,000 that’s done right.
[Ms. Kinzel said Commissioner McDaniel is misstating information. We will absolutely
short pay vendors.]
There’s a simple adjustment that could be done to allow for a better flow and give us
a better reputation for paying contractors.
Some contractors say they’re getting rich off the county, while there are many bills
being withheld.
Are we losing good contractors due to non-payment?
In 2010 or 2011, Barron Collier Companies conducted an independent study and
Collier was ranked one of the worst counties to do business with. A lot had to do
with the payment plans.
We are losing good contractors because they won’t do business with the county.
We should work with the Clerk’s Office, senior management and County Attorney
on our contractual arrangements to allow a path to pay. That will incentivize more
contractors to want to work with us.
The county also is encumbered by its interpretation of zoning and building codes.
The quality control quality assurance for the design aspect is done in-house if we
have the people with experience.
All departments get a copy of the design plans for each stage of design, and they
opine on it. Recently, we haven’t had the staffing, so we outsource that.
We had another consultant reviewing qualified designers and they’re hard on each
other. They make sure they provide enough comments, a substantial amount of
comments regarding the design.
Regulations require us to have peer review for bridges, in addition to staff. We have
bridge engineers ensure calculations are correct.
After the design phase, Mr. Ahmad leads the CEI team. Matt Thomas is the
construction manager and Matt McClean’s team has similar functions. The team
ensures projects are built according to plans and specifications.
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We test everything, including soil. Others outsource that.
We are governed by FDOT specifications and standards. To ensure quality control,
we must do CEI and test every aspect. We test concrete, asphalt, earth work, steel.
Every issue on the field is tested several times throughout the project to make sure
the quality of compaction is done, the asphalt is to the right radiation and
specifications, and the steel is what we thought it was.
Nuclear tests of asphalt are conducted to ensure it has a proper compaction so it lasts
as many years as we say it will. Those tests aren’t conducted in-house.
If we know a change order involves a design error, the contractor is responsible, not
the county or taxpayers. The county evaluates every change order.
The county will not pay for something that a contractor made a mistake on.
Change orders can be value added and benefit the county.
Mr. Ahmad detailed the various change orders:
A designer is responsible for a design mistake.
Change orders are not dirty words in project management. It’s managing change.
Many of our change orders are value added to a project.
For the Chokoloskee Bridge, we went to design and construction thinking we’d keep
the walls that support the earth because they looked good. But we discovered there
was a huge wall issue we didn’t know about when we went to design. That was a
good change order.
Another good change order is when a contractor says he can do something better
than your designer did. There’s a process in the FDOT manual, the cost incentive. If
you come to us with a better idea and we implement that idea, you design it and you
show us that you can save the county, you get 50% of the savings. The county saved
over $600,000 in a change order that produced that result.
On Collier Boulevard, from Davis to U.S. 41, the contractor told us he has to import
the asphalt from Miami, but he has the same material here. You have to study it to
say it’s the same quality. We did that and it was a $500,000 change order that
benefited the county.
There are bad change orders, such as when someone says we should expand this a
little more. Sometimes residents demand it.
We designed a Veterans Memorial with standard 6-foot sidewalks. The public came
to the public meeting and some said, “Why not make it 10 feet?” They said someone
jogging can walk through while someone with a stroller is walking on the sidewalk.
It was a good idea, but we ended up with a substantial change order.
For Imperial Golf Estates, they were now really close to the roadway and asked us to
study it for noise abatement. We used the federal process to do that. We studied it.
They qualified for a noise abatement. That’s a change order.
The contractor said it would be $1.9 million and we thought we could get it cheaper,
for less than $1 million, so we didn’t accept the change order. But we ended up
paying the same price as the change order.
Commissioner Saunders said he had a question for the County Attorney. The Marco
Island Airport project had serious problems, but it sounds like most county projects go bad.
October 3, 2023
12
How would you compare that with other communities’ experiences and what’s our general
experience?
Attorney Klatzkow said what went bad on Marco Island was the board awarded it to the
low bidder. The statute says to award the contract to the low bidder, unless you have a
reason not to. We would have preferred a different contractor, but what we had was the low
bidder and they dragged their heels.
Commissioner Saunders asked what that meant.
Attorney Klatzkow said the contractor didn’t perform as quickly as they should have.
They were working on multiple jobs, so when they got to us, they got to us. But the
settlement was very favorable for the county, so in the end, the county did very well for the
airport.
Commissioner Saunders asked how much of a delay there was.
Attorney Klatzkow said about two years. You have very good staff who manage these
contracts as well as any staff in the state, if not better. The issue you have is that it costs
contractors more to do business with Collier County than the private sector. When
contracts come, you might have two bidders. If you’re lucky, you’ll have three. We don’t
have many people bidding on our projects because we’re hard to deal with from a
government standpoint. That’s true for all governments. The clerk has to look through
every invoice to ensure it matches the contract. It’s an additional layer of checks and
balances that the private sector does not have. He can’t recall ever having a project that was
a disaster, just projects with delays. We have some beautiful projects. We did well.
Commissioner Saunders asked if there were other projects with similar problems or
delays.
Attorney Klatzkow said none have risen to his level. We’ve had very few disputes with
our contractors. There are times where we’ll discuss liquidated damages and resolve it that
way, but all litigation comes before the board.
Commissioner Saunders asked the County Manager and Deputy County Manager Finn
about their experiences with contractors.
Ms. Patterson responded:
Since the pandemic, we’re in a different place with the workforce than before. We had
some difficult projects we managed through the pandemic, but they didn’t rise to
litigation. They were delayed for various reasons and we continue to struggle in this
environment with inflation and workforce, just like everybody does.
During her time working in Stormwater, there were one or two projects that
experienced difficulties due to various delays, staffing or the low bidder, but we
ended up resolving them and satisfactorily completing the project. They were
painful, but we made our way through.
October 3, 2023
13
One is the west Goodlette project. That went on during the height of COVID and
sometimes there weren’t enough people to do the work. That complicated the fact
that we had a low bidder who was not prepared for some of the job intricacies. We
made sure we documented all of that, so if they bid on a future job, we’ll know that
we had difficulties with them.
That’s something we’re encouraging staff to do when they’re experiencing
difficulties. It’s not that frequent but is something they will document so we know
that when we’re looking at hiring contractors or firms in the future for design or
construction, we’ll have documentation.
The same occurs with change orders. We aggressively attack change orders, both
positive and those perceived as negative. It’s a project manager’s tool and one that is
required.
A change order just for the sake of a change order is something we take very
seriously. They often come onto the agenda now as largely standalone items, so that
it explains the intricacies of why that’s happening. If we see these things happening
repeatedly, we deal with it right away.
We’ve made significant progress from where we were to where we are now with
change orders, but she agrees with the County Attorney, we had some jobs that
didn’t go exactly as planned, but we managed our way through it, not to the
detriment of taxpayers.
Commissioner Saunders said there’s always a conflict between the County Commission,
County Manager and the Clerk due to the statutes, but we have a good working relationship
with the clerk. There may have been misinformation about how her office operates in terms
of paying bills. We want to make sure contractors are paid in a timely manner, but also want
to make sure contractors aren’t over billing us or trying to take advantage of the county, so
the clerk’s statutory oversight keeps us from getting into that kind of trouble. There has been
discussion about the payment of bills, so we need to understand the process and how you
pay a bill if there’s a problem.
Ms. Kinzel told the BCC:
Chairman McDaniel hit a hot button because we have worked diligently and she
takes it personally as the clerk.
She was the finance director in 2010. In the past, we had a lot of issues and changes,
but a lot has changed since then, including the relationship with county staff and
commissioners.
If something is going wrong, we try to jump on it.
We will short pay. We’ve had to force vendors to take short payments because of
attorneys being hesitant to accept the short payment, but we told the County
Attorney’s Office we were willing to short pay what we could audit.
We have had many of those meetings in our offices on some large projects.
Commissioner McDaniel has called her four or five times in the last year and the
majority of non-payments involved contractors not paying their subcontractors – not
the clerk not paying the contractor.
Prior to COVID, we started working with CBIA and are willing to continue. We
brought in auditing staff to work through the projects and show the documentation
October 3, 2023
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needed and how to get paid quickly before getting into a payment situation.
We worked with the CBIA to encourage outside contractors and show them how to
do business with the county and how to get paid quickly.
Through our robust SAP, we can track when an invoice arrives, who touched it, how
long it takes and where it goes. Anytime you call with a vendor problem, she can
look at the history.
If it’s our fault, we will take action against the clerk who may have been negligent,
but most are not.
We don’t want the mantra that the Clerk’s Office isn’t paying vendors because that
will harm us getting vendors, but there is a labor shortage.
We have talked to a lot of vendors about how to do business.
What we see in processing has a lot to do with contract language. We’re currently
working through AshBritt, which wants a contract changed after the event. That isn’t
legal, so we look at contracts for legal reasons.
We also have submitted three vendors to the State Attorney’s Office for prosecution
for falsifying documents and defrauding the county. Not crossing T’s and dotting I’s
isn’t something we prosecute for, but falsifying and trying to steal from the county
or taxpayers is something we will prosecute for.
We can track, large vendor. We ask them to come in so we can work with them to
ensure they’re paid quickly.
She takes pride in how quickly we process invoices. Everything is supposed to come
through our portal and it’s tracked in time. It goes to the department for oversight,
review and approval, comes back to us and then we have a prompt payment time
frame we are required to meet by statute.
Commissioner McDaniel said he knows he hit her hot button, but also said the county pays
thousands of bills every day.
Ms. Kinzel said over 100,000 a year, volumes.
Commissioner McDaniel suggested that we work with the clerk and County Attorney on
contracts, and senior staff on working with contractors and enhanced communication. There
was a misunderstanding about short pay by one contractor, who thought that was the full
payment. It was a communications breakdown between the contractor, Clerk’s Office and
the contractual arrangement. We need to enhance communications to have better contracts
and communication with contractors to better understand the process so they can be paid in
a timely manner. You and your office are doing an amazing job for our county and are
protecting taxpayers’ money. Thank you.
Ms. Kinzel said she talks to the County Attorney and the County Manager’s Office daily
and we’re enjoying the best relationship we’ve seen. If anyone hears otherwise, we’ll
resolve it right away.
Commissioner Hall said he can see the pluses and minuses of the CEI process and in-house
work. We’re not attacking the process but are passionate about wanting to improve it. We
hear many stories. That’s what the workshop is for, to learn from our mistakes.
October 3, 2023
15
Mr. Ahmad thanked him and said that’s also their goal. We never stop looking at how we
can improve. We are passionate public servants and hope that shows. We demonstrate that
every time we come before you.
Chairman LoCastro told the BCC:
Marco Island Executive Airport was a multimillion-dollar project that not only
provides a building, but amazing service during peace time. But if we had a
hurricane, it becomes the Red Cross headquarters, FEMA headquarters, etc. We’re
lucky in this county to have multiple runways.
Other counties have to have that support land hundreds of miles away and trucked to
their community.
When projects don’t go well, we want to learn from our mistakes.
After the Marco Island Executive Airport, he analyzed that contract and it was more
than two years late, but we will never let that happen again.
That was a bad contractor who had issues and when we dug deeper, maybe under a
different name on the East Coast, he had some legal issues. We knew the contractor
wasn’t great, but in the middle of the project, when it stalled, we found out they were
less than great, so there’s a lesson to be learned.
Although we settled out of court and made money, it was two years late and time is
money. We could have been landing airplanes, putting them in hangars and not
being embarrassed out in the community.
It’s not a success that we settled out of court because it was embarrassing.
Is the Marco Island Executive Airport the exception or the rule for what we’re
finding out here? (It’s in the middle.)
The sports complex and other jobs also didn’t go perfectly, but ended on a positive
note. We need to tell the public about projects that went right.
For Goodlette Road, when the contractor asked to work at 2 or 3 a.m. to get eight
hours of work done in two hours because nobody’s there, it came in early and on
budget.
He told the contractor if he finished early and came in on budget, a picture of that
road would be on his company’s brochure and he’d be part of that success.
There should be a report card at the end of work to grade the project, whether it was
an A+ or an anomaly for reasons we couldn’t anticipate, but we learned a lot.
There’s so much done behind the scenes that’s a good use of taxpayer dollars. We
need to cheer successes.
There have been many difficult or complicated projects, such as septic to sewer
conversion. The reality was it could have gone poorly, but we did an incredible job.
Mr. Ahmad thanked him.
Chairman LoCastro said we should tell the community that this is not the exception. It’s
becoming the rule.
October 3, 2023
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Mr. Ahmad replied that:
Most county projects go well, but we always could do a better job and should
advertise the great successes we have. We usually have a ribbon-cutting ceremony
to celebrate the end of a project.
Veterans Memorial bridge, which is under construction in Golden Gate City, was
built with minimal interruptions to the public. It’s near completion. Twenty years
ago, the county had one lane in each direction and now has six lanes everywhere
and people think how beautiful it is with the landscaping.
Chairman LoCastro said:
We’ve headed off a lot of challenges and made some smart decisions.
There are times we could have stopped the problems sooner, such as the airport,
when the contractor wasn’t showing up for months. The county wasn’t screaming to
his satisfaction, but we finally dragged them back in. They were on another project.
That’s not acceptable. If we’d continued to allow ghosting, it would have been 3½
years late.
Commissioner McDaniel said time is money. Lack of use costs us money. Lack of
communication costs us time, so enhancement of communication will ultimately save us
money and provide for a better use of taxpayers’ money.
Commissioner Kowal said at Whippoorwill and Marbella Lakes, we promised residents
we wouldn’t open that road until the traffic light was installed. But there was a delay
because the traffic control box for that light was given to the high school until theirs
arrived.
Mr. Ahmad responded:
There’s a supply issue that we’re facing throughout the state and possibly country.
Traffic controllers take 1-1½ years to procure and buy. We had controllers in our
shop that we loaned the school, so they were able to open the roadway on time.
They still haven’t received their controllers.
We promised Marbella residents we wouldn’t open the roadway until we have
traffic control because they’ll get additional traffic from Pine Ridge and
communities to the north.
We can’t lend them the traffic controllers we have in case we have a hurricane or
an accident that knocks out a controller. It was a missed assessment made on that
level.
We’re facing the same issues as contractors and that’s the reason we’ve been
granting them later dates. They’re really not behind schedule because we put a
stop-work order on the project because we can’t make the contractor deliver
something that we can’t deliver ourselves.
Commissioner Kowal said he understood why they put in the stop-work order. It
originally sounded like you had one that came in and gave it to one and not the other.
We’re waiting on traffic controllers for years.
October 3, 2023
17
[Commissioners took a break from 10:37 a.m. to 10:45 a.m.]
Mr. Ahmad his presentation:
This is the product of design. Veterans Memorial plan sheets show what contractors
were constructing. They were designed by professionals we hire and produce that
kind of volume. When you see a value number on contract negotiations, it’s a lot of
work, producing plans that are buildable and hopefully minimize change orders.
That’s our objective in the first design phase.
We have a small in-house design group that targets immediate needs, such as
shoulder improvements. We’ve done many on Immokalee and Oil Well roads, and
traffic signals where we need them.
We can’t go to procurement and hire consultants. The procurement process follows
the CCNA state statute. It’s a lengthy process, roughly eight months or more if you
get stuck in negotiations and a consultant doesn’t agree with you.
In-house, we have a team of three project managers, professional engineers. One
project manager manages local agency participation projects. Another is a regular
project manager who manages smaller sidewalk projects, such as grants. We get
lots of money from the state and manage it through this section.
The in-house team is ideal for smaller projects, not capital improvement projects.
The number of disciplines for smaller projects is far less than what’s required for
large projects. You may need somebody from drainage or a surveyor. The manager
of the unit is a licensed surveyor who signs and seals their plans.
State law requires that a project that goes to construction must be signed in
accordance with professional engineer certification. There’s less risk because it’s
not bridges or significant projects, but there is definitely still a risk.
We have risk insurance for employees who sign and seal, in case something
happens and someone sues.
The idea of an in-house team is to save time and get projects done quickly.
It’s a small team and we get about $2 million in safety improvements. We use those
strategically where we have a list of 30 projects that have a safety committee, and it
encompasses the sheriff, staff, and other departments. They look at collision
diagrams, crashes throughout the county and identify smaller projects that have
high value of attack and safety.
Mr. Ahmad then detailed the CEI portion of his presentation:
We are governed by the Florida Department of Transportation. We use the FDOT
Procedures Manual for designing and inspecting projects. The FDOT requires a list
of items on projects, so we use their design standards and specifications and must
comply with testing.
Matt Thomas, who is licensed, has a team of two project managers and seven
inspectors. Currently, the seven inspectors are dedicated to the Vanderbilt Beach
Road extension.
If the board wants to increase staff and target certain projects, we can do it in-house.
They plan, review and attend pre-bid meetings. Once they get plans designed,
signed and sealed by a professional engineer (a handshake for the team), they start
the procurement process for the purchase order.
October 3, 2023
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There are pre-construction meetings. There’s a daily report documented, and we
pay for items installed. We itemize everything, such as linear feet of curbs so we
know exactly how many linear feet are estimated in a project.
Every day, the field crew and inspectors measure what was installed and paid for.
At the end of the project, we only pay for items we bought. We verify and test that
it’s there.
They hold weekly or bi-weekly meetings to see progress of projects, delays, change
orders and issues that arise. They approve all the documents, change orders,
specification related, ensure testing and DOT components, drainage or utilities.
We make sure that before you bury it, you make sure that the bedding on a pipe is
not rock. The quality is dictated by the specification, and we wouldn’t allow a
contractor to bury something that’s not inspected and verified.
We manage property owners’ complaints. There are many. If you live along a
construction project, it’s noisy and dusty and other issues arise. This team is the
attack team for that and we hopefully do a good job ensuring neighbors are less
impacted by construction.
Every month, they work with the contractor to prepare the pay estimates and the
contractor gets paid for items installed, for delivered material, etc. At the end, final
payments are made.
We team up for lessons learned at the end of a project to ensure all permits are
complied with. We have meetings to see what lessons we learn from a project, why
it went bad, what the issues were, if there are outstanding claims. Those claims
could be valid or not valid. We look at the change orders we rejected because they
sometimes come in as a claim at the end of a project. It may escalate to a lawsuit
over not being paid or we may be able to resolve it.
Sometimes the county attorney gets involved early on and assists us with how we
address and defend an issue later. There are claims on almost every project. If you
disagree with the contractor, then you file a claim. At the end of the project, we
look at it and see if it’s worth going to court over or come to an agreement.
The CEI world needs certification. A certified inspector can take all these
certifications, which are mostly done by FDOT certification. There are others, such
as IMSA (International Municipal Signal Association) and other groups that teach
maintenance of traffic to ensure a contractor put in a safe work zone. Those
certified groups get on a project.
A certified inspector can be certified in earthwork, concrete, signals and other
fields. Unlike a structural engineer, they specialize in doing bridges, walls,
structure, traffic design, signals and making sure traffic flows.
Expertise is narrowed down in the design. You could have an inspector certified in
all these fields. There may be bridges that would be excluded because you need a
specialized PE to sign and seal to show they visited the project to ensure the project
was built in accordance with the design plans and specification.
A certified inspector is not a lengthy PE requirement. It may not involve a college
degree. They come from trades, mostly the superintendents, such as water, sewer
and utilities. There also are means for certified professionals at higher levels.
[The PPT showed projects, construction value, staffing and CEI costs.]
October 3, 2023
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Not all CEI are created equal. We’re an FDOT CEI, which requires us to be on the
job to make sure the measurements of construction are done, and we get the quality
we paid for.
We have outsourced a lot of projects for many reasons, not including cost, but
because we may not have the staff. We have one PE, two project managers and
seven inspectors and the demand for inspectors on different projects involves man
hours – how long you need to put an inspector on a project.
On a smaller project, local agency participation grant type projects, it’s intensive
and involves interviewing every worker on the job to ensure they follow all the
requirements of the grantor. It’s very expensive, close to 20%. That’s what FDOT is
facing and we check with them on price and experience. They’re usually between
12-20% on their projects.
A discussion ensued and the following points were made:
Can we get more bang for our buck doing work in-house with the expertise we
have? Can we increase staff? Yes, we can save some funds. We rely on impact fees
and surtaxes.
In 2006, $74 million in impact fees were collected for transportation. In the
economic downturn around 2010, it was under $5 million. You cannot count on the
funding if the housing stops and you started hiring a lot of people. We can lend
staff to help countywide. That’s the balance you mentioned so you keep staff busy.
Before we hire additional staff to absorb projects, our challenge is we want
everybody working to the fullest. We only have so much money to spend. There
could have been a big-dollar savings on some of these projects if we had the ability
to do it in-house, if it was going to absorb risk and you had the expertise.
Could we do it? Yes, if you hired more staff.
Staff is maxed out, but it depends on the project. To pull stuff in-house, we’d
probably have to hire one more person. You’d have to do the math to see if it was
worth it: We invested this amount and we saved this amount.
It depends on what we’re assigning staff to do.
The in-house team designing smaller projects can be put on projects. But projects
still need to be inspected to ensure items we paid for were installed. We can do it,
but to be dedicated to a 2½-year project would be difficult.
Mr. Ahmad continued his presentation:
In-house CEI expense ranges in the FDOT world involving facilities rely on
building permits and the building department. They have inspectors for the
building codes to inspect aspects of vertical construction.
We watch every activity and make sure we’re getting what we want.
Our range of CEI is between 5-7% in-house. Outsourced CEI is roughly 10%. It’s
only the lab projects that have a high threshold of 20%, or a grant-type project.
We conducted a study in 2020. When FDOT had projects under $5 million, they
did them in-house. We checked again and they stopped that practice. They
outsource everything on CEI, unlike the project’s design aspect.
Potential CEI staffing. What do we need to staff this capital program? We have 22
October 3, 2023
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large capital projects in the 2024 budget in the AUIR. For Utilities, it’s similar.
There’s over $492 million worth of construction.
We’re dealing with engineering and CEI engineering technicians. Much of the
project cost is not engineering or CEI, it’s construction.
Of the $153 million for Vanderbilt Extension, the design was 10-12% and the CEI
was in-house. We have a staff of five and it will eventually be seven. It’s getting
into gear and it’s almost a year into construction.
Construction is where the money is. CEI would save.
He presented this to the Productivity Committee, which had a spreadsheet of
substantial county costs. We probably do over a billion dollars’ worth of projects.
Most of the cost is in construction, not engineering.
We go out to procurement and it gets bid to a qualified contractor. We don’t
struggle much with the good ones, but you do with the bad ones.
Construction has issues. There’s not always an agreement with the contractor on
quality, time or production rate.
For CEI staffing, we’re looking at four times the current staffing level if you want
CEI on all capital projects. You need a substantial increase in staffing.
There is definitely a savings when doing it in-house, provided you have work for
those employees after a project ends because it’s all based on time allotted to that
project. If the project goes longer and you don’t get into another project, then those
savings diminish.
We finish projects on time better than what we do when we hire CEI. We have
better communications, make sure issues are resolved early and the CEI job ends at
the time we finish the project.
There are definite savings in better communication. With more flexibility with in-
house staff to move to other projects during downtime, can we use that staff
somewhere else? Yes. We have and we’ve done that during a downturn.
We’ve loaned out staff during a slow time.
The negative is that to manage the current pipeline, you need four times the
staffing that you have and most of these projects will require four to six people to
inspect on a daily basis, and a project manager.
You would have to hire a group, a team of five to seven to go from project to
project. You can’t just hire one person. There are overhead costs of vehicles, office
space, IT, etc. There’s definitely a cost.
The work program can shift based on impact fees or policy.
During the economic downturn, projects were canceled because impact fees
stopped. Golden Gate Boulevard moved out to future years for both phases. We
did those projects in-house with the staffing that we have because it was during a
downturn. They are just as qualified and possibly better than other consultants.
We train them and pay for training to make sure we do our job correctly.
In conclusion, we need to find a long-term financial healthy balance and financial
health evaluation. The potential savings are there and we recommend that. We
could test it out with small teams throughout the year.
Currently, we have 10 and we could possibly get another team to do a project or
two based on what’s coming next and test it out. It may not be valid for every
October 3, 2023
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department, such as utilities, but these are not jobs that are hard to find workers
for. There are many construction workers.
The team of construction inspectors are very experienced in construction and know
how to test quality. They’ve been with FDOT or other CEI outsource consultants.
We stole Matt from Hardesty & Hanover who was a consultant. He was on a
project on 951 years ago, left and we got him back.
(Road Construction Manager) Steve Ritter retired and we have new young
leadership and they’ll carry the torch into the future.
During questioning between Commissioner McDaniel and Mr. Ahmad, the following
points were made:
Have we explored incentive pay so contractors will come in on time and under
budget?
Mr. Ahmad said that years ago, we put in a $3 million incentive for finishing on
time. It was a critical project and we stopped implementing that. There were delays
and they blamed the county for causing those. He dumped dirty water into a
wetland and created delays. In the end, he filed a claim to get the $3 million
incentive saying it wasn’t his fault. It depends on the contractor. You get what you
get.
They successfully implemented that at the DOT, but he has not had a good
experience in his prior life with incentives, so we haven’t implemented them.
Commissioner McDaniel wants that to be done transparently with milestones in
place to attract good contractors and allow them to make more money doing
projects. He’d like to move in that direction, if possible. He knows people take
advantage of circumstances.
Commissioner McDaniel said this board is the elected complaint department. The
county pays thousands in bills every day, but we only hear about the ones that are
delayed or have an issue.
Commissioner McDaniel said Sports Facilities Companies, which manages the
Paradise Coast Sports Complex, was hesitant to talk about their successes, fearing
it would look like bragging. Maybe we can speak about our successes, as well as
pros and cons, good and bad. That would be beneficial.
This is a workshop and we’re looking for ways to do things better.
Chairman LoCastro said it’s good to put a spotlight on things and learn.
Commissioner Kowal said when he was young, he learned quality control while on the
job when Pittsburgh International Airport was being built. They looked at ways to save
money and talked about in-house work. Do we do every aspect of that in-house?
Mr. Ahmad replied that:
We hire inspectors for quality control to ensure we’re getting what we paid for by
testing. It’s called verification testing, VT, such as densities for asphalt,
compaction for dirt, lime rock, etc. We still outsource that.
Commissioner Kowal asked if there’s a chance we could save.
October 3, 2023
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Mr. Ahmad replied that:
CEI is the best money spent on any project.
We spec and that’s what we’re buying. The only way to ensure that we got what
we wanted is testing. Many contractors do not follow at times.
While doing the bridge at Collier and Green boulevards, we paid for special
concrete for the bridge foundation to ensure the bridge lasted 75 years due to the
water’s salinity.
We had them inspected at night and they had the steel, rebars, forms and
everything set and were ready to pour concrete. They brought the concrete. The
inspector called him that night. He said they were giving 3,000-4000 PSI (pound
per square inch), when you spent money for 5,000-6000 PSI and you shouldn’t
accept it.
That’s easy. You’ll end up with poor quality projects. We can’t stop the contractor
or call the sheriff to say they’re doing a bad specification. We documented it.
We make sure that if you do it, you’re taking a risk, so the contractor poured all 30
trucks plus at night. We tested the concrete after it cured. We found it wouldn’t
reach that level. We hired a specialist, who said it would reduce the life of the
bridge from 75 years to possibly 30.
We weren’t buying a 30-year bridge if we paid for 75 years, so we made him take
it up, close to $400,000 of concrete, steel and time delays.
It was one of the leading contractors in bridge design and construction, so his
theory is to do CEI because you may not get what you pay for.
Commissioner Hall offered some suggestions:
The Naples Park project is a big project with 20 streets and is basically the same
job repeated six or seven times by doing two streets at a time. We pay for CEI
services there.
He watched as the first street was done. (Mr. Ahmad said his son also lives there.)
They struggled a bit in the beginning, but found their rhythm and became a well-
oiled machine.
Instead of going forward with CEI and the contractor, maybe we could throw a
bone at the contractor to do his own thinking because he’s familiar with the
project. If he gets in a bind, he can call county staff and they can work things out.
Maybe staff can do in-house design and CEI on time-sensitive projects so we’re
not relying on somebody else dragging their feet. We would provide guidance.
We could make an effort to move all quality assurance and quality control in-house
for construction and do that without increasing staff.
We could hire CEI on a case-by-case basis to be approved by the county manager
for tasks that are not cost-effective for us, such as testing.
Mr. Ahmad said with CEI, you get what you pay for. We disagree on that because CEI is
the best money spent.
Commissioner Hall said he meant to just use outside CEI on large, expensive projects.
October 3, 2023
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Mr. Ahmad responded that:
If the board wants to increase staffing to do CEI for time-sensitive projects, make
sure they have work to do. We outsource certain things to get them done in a
timely fashion.
That could be a board decision. That would force us to have five to seven people
per team or less, if the project needs fewer employees.
Why no surtax? It’s been taxing for staff to accomplish it in a timely fashion.
QA (quality assurance) by in-house staff would produce the same result and
conclusion and would be on a project-by-project basis to hire and get in motion
with a team. Additional staff would need vehicles for inspection to go to the
projects.
He doesn’t support not doing CEI. His team would probably agree. You’ve got to
know what you want, that it was paid correctly, make sure it’s done per
specifications and per the design and the intent of the plans.
We spend a lot of money on design plans and if you’re not going to make sure that
those plans are followed, they would not be implementing the project.
A discussion ensued and the following points were made:
If there was a time sensitive project and the board’s recommendation was to try to
pull as many employees in-house as possible to save money and have a sense of
urgency and he didn’t have the staff to do it, it would take too much time to hire
and the project would expire before they could hire.
Projects are doable in-house, but we don’t have the staff to do it.
It takes longer to get the expertise, hire them and we have to pay more.
You would need 37 people to do all that. A project manager would manage two.
2.2. Productivity Committee Presentation (26783).
Commissioner Saunders told the chairman:
Two members of the Productivity Committee, Vice Chairman Mike Lyster and
Melanie Miller, have a short presentation and need to leave.
The Productivity Committee has been looking at engineering and wanted to
provide an update.
He spoke with Chairman Larry Magel about hiring a firm to evaluate zero-based
budgeting for the county.
He suggested selecting four or five firms, interviewing them and ranking them for
the commission, rather than trying to find the firms themselves.
Mr. Lyster thanked Commissioner McDaniel for reinstituting the Productivity
Committee, a smaller committee that reviewed stormwater. Later, when he was the
chairman, Commissioner Saunders asked him if he thought we needed to go back to what
the original Productivity Committee did and they could have some subcommittees, so we
expanded to that and it’s working well. Larry Magel is our chairman and he’s the vice
chairman. We were looking at in-house and outsourcing, which is a passion for one of
our members. Melanie did a PowerPoint presentation on it.
October 3, 2023
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Ms. Miller detailed a PowerPoint presentation:
We did a diligent review over the last year and had a lot of discussions with the
Parks & Recreation and Facilities departments that resulted in various process
improvements and enhancements, including custodial services, finding
efficiencies, oversight, processes and defining a clear delineation of
responsibilities between Facilities and Parks & Recreation.
We considered a strike-team approach. That wasn’t implemented. It wasn’t
feasible or efficient.
We worked with Parks & Rec to redesign and implement the 311 signs, as well as
enhancing work-order tracking for Parks & Recreation through Facilities.
She’s been on the committee for two years and Mike has been on it longer.
We continue to work on establishing a Friends of the Park Program within county
parameters. There’s an avenue for that and we’re trying to work with the Clerk of
Courts to complete that. Commissioner Saunders had an idea on how to get that
going.
We started conducting a thorough analysis regarding construction and engineering
services, insourcing versus outsourcing.
We want to identify areas where the approach is most appropriate, establish
criteria to guide future evaluation and the decision-making process, and consider
some factors brought up today about feasibility.
If you can’t hire staff, it’s hard to implement that. This is an important topic for
the county, both the management and taxpayers.
We welcome and appreciate if the Board of County Commissioners has feedback
and guidance on topics to review, such as operations or zero-based budgeting.
We have a diverse committee. She lives in District 5 and serves in District 2 as
vice president of the Pelican Bay Foundation and serves as treasurer of
STARability Foundation. She and her husband own a small business and she’s
one of 11 Productivity Committee members. They take their roles and
responsibilities very seriously.
She thanked staff, management and Commissioner Saunders for having good,
transparent conversations and sharing information. They’re always there to
support us.
Commissioner McDaniel asked what the board can do to help the Productivity
Committee.
Ms. Miller said they can funnel ideas and feedback through Commissioner Saunders on
anything you’d like us to dig into deeper. We have our own ideas. We talked about
transportation but didn’t go down that path. You can point us in a direction. Interaction
with management and the commission is a great opportunity to share and show you what
we’re working on, the committee’s responsibility and how we dig deep. We’ve had lots
of conversations over the last year with Parks & Rec. They were very patient with us, so
that’s appreciated.
Commissioner McDaniel asked if there are any particular things the board can do to
better the efforts of the Productivity Committee.
October 3, 2023
25
Mr. Lyster said when they expanded members to 11, they had three commissioners
present. We asked them what their priorities were and all three mentioned Parks &
Recreation, so we’ve spent over a year on that, looking at various aspects. We feel we
improved it and served our purpose. Are there others out there? We just began the
discussion on in-sourcing and outsourcing, so there’s fertile ground there. We can work
through each department, which is what the original committee did in the 1990s. We
haven’t gotten there yet because the board gave us topics.
Commissioner McDaniel said he wants to open channels of communication, so bring
your ideas and thoughts on these processes to Commissioner Saunders so he can bring
them back to the board for formal direction, so the steering isn’t coming from this board
to you or vice versa. He wants to hear from the committee. If you see something we can
do by policy to make adjustments to enhance your efforts, that was the point, to engage
the extremely knowledgeable community we have and have them better assist us with
overall government operations.
Ms. Miller thanked the board for having them.
Commissioner Saunders thanked them for being here. He’s sat with a lot of different
committees over the years and Productivity Committee members are experienced in
many different fields, from finance to construction to government. They can add a lot of
expertise and really dig into issues. They probably learned a lot listening to the board
discussion today. In terms of engineering, it’s time well spent.
Chairman LoCastro said:
We were wondering how we could help all the committees. The No. 1 way we
can help them is by nominating the strongest candidates to committees.
At times, we don’t get a lot of applications for these committees. He’s
disappointed when he sees three applications for three openings. We’ve done a
great job of saying we should wait another month for more applicants.
They should know the schedule before they apply.
He discovered someone he nominated to the Productivity Committee resigned
(before the two-year term was up). They were able to fill it because they had
applicants in reserves.
He wants to be alerted by the County Attorney’s Office if someone resigns.
If we’ve appointed somebody to a two-year or four-year term and they
prematurely exit, we should know, especially if they made an aggressive pitch to
be on the committee.
Maybe they just wanted to serve for a shorter amount of time as a nice resume
bullet. That’s happened on multiple occasions. In this case, this person had a track
record of minimal time on four different committees and exited for the exact same
reasons every time, so he asked the County Attorney if there was anything staff
could do.
We take our nomination process seriously.
How can we best help committees nominate people that we feel confident will
October 3, 2023
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serve the full term, have the resume and depth of experience?
When he was on the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee, he was
flabbergasted when he walked into his first couple of meetings and found a poor
attendance rate. He asked for records and found the absentee rate was horrific and
most people listed the AHAC and volunteer work for the county on their LinkedIn
pages.
He did all this work for the county and then we couldn’t even take a vote because
we didn’t have a quorum. That was disappointing.
Ms. Patterson said if they want to see the utilities presentation, it’s going to follow a
similar format as transportation. Jay gave you a deep look into the CEI design and
construction process. If you want a presentation by Mr. McLean, we can do that, or in the
interests of time, we can take the public speakers.
Chairman LoCastro said we’ve had a healthy discussion and covered what’s in here.
Ms. Patterson said you’ll find each of your groups are going to have some of the same
ideas, but different subject matter. You’ve given us ideas of things to look at. This is an
evolving conversation. You can bring suggestions about doing things differently. You
can bring back ideas as this progresses. We’re going to be having further conversations
with the Productivity Committee on this topic, so things are lining up to lead toward a
future direction. We can come back. Let us get our arms around what we talked about
today.
Chairman LoCastro responded:
A slide worthy of taking a look at Big Projects in FY24. It shows staff numbers
and percent of design versus construction.
These are big ones, the mental-health facility, Paradise Coast Sports Complex
phase three, Big Corkscrew Regional Park and the new chiller plant. These are
things that would have been presented here.
If you look the percentage of CEI versus construction, it’s manageable. It’s small,
which is what we want.
An issue came to him and probably other commissioners about our public
libraries and an organization we’re a member of. This meeting is to give us
information. It’s probably not appropriate to vote on that, but we’re here to take
advantage of it. There may be other topics.
Public Speakers
Richard Eckstein told the BCC:
Public employees are underpaid. His suggestion is a 150% pay increase across the
board for all county employees, public servants of the county.
Everything’s on a budget, but he has a suggestion to generate revenue for the
county to cover the cost for a pay raise for all county servants. They’re underpaid,
overworked and are suffering and he can sense it.
His suggestion is that we make all the golf courses and landscape companies buy
a permit to spread fertilizer every time they want to feed plants.
October 3, 2023
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His second suggestion is soil testing of all the soils before they purchase their
county permit. Fertilizer testing would be a good place to start.
Another problem is Randall Boulevard and Immokalee. He called the FDOT
about the project progression and they’re not answering the phone. He tried to talk
to a couple of the designers and get input on the design on the flyover, which is
way behind schedule. They haven’t submitted a design plan to commissioners.
They need to speed that along because the road there is heavily traveled and has
too much traffic. Every morning it’s backed up 600 feet from Randall and 8th
Street.
Can someone in the county get a hold of Brightline and see if they’d be interested
in doing a study on high-speed rail through the county.
Chairman LoCastro we’ve already had a discussion with FDOT. It’s a topic of
discussion at our MPO meetings.
Mr. Eckstein said a half-cent sales tax could fund it.
Ms. Patterson asked Trinity Scott to speak with Mr. Eckstein about the transportation
issues and fertilizer, both of which are within her area.
Keith Flaugh, of the Florida Citizens Alliance:
He urges commissioners to cut ties with the American Library Association by
removing ALA membership dues from the budget, as Citrus County and
Hernando County have just done.
The ALA has become notorious for its aggressive promotion of drag-queen story
issues, sexually explicit LGBTQ materials, etc.
Last spring, the ALA elected Emily Drabinski, a self-proclaimed Marxist. She
served as the keynote speaker of the Socialism 2023 Conference, where she
proclaimed publicly, “Public education needs to be a site for socialist organizing.
Libraries really need to do this also. They will be key in advancing the Marxist
cause among our youth.”
Under Drabinki, the ALA has moved to push expansion of drag queen story hour
across the nation.
In August, Kirk Cameron, publisher of BraveBooks, an amazing series, attempted
to hold National Family Story Hour on August 5th in public libraries nationwide.
The ALA held an emergency National Virtual Conference on how to deny access
and block this event. Librarians were instructed to “invent programming so that
day’s programming for the reading rooms is all filled up on that specific date.”
The ALA website devotes an entire page to resource links and toolkits for
organizing drag queen story hours involving gender fluidity.
The ALA should be defunded not only because of Drabinsky but because it is a
left-wing organization that’s been very involved in our school districts.
Many media centers used to license within various counties through the Board of
County Commissioners to decide which books they’re going to buy. There are
over 150 books Collier residents object to that are on the ALA-supported list.
He knows they can vote on this. He asked them to defund it in October. We don’t
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need this kind of garbage in our county.
Chairman LoCastro said we’re going to have a presentation from our county library
leadership to give us the background and factual details on what the organization does for
us. We’ve heard bits and pieces.
Jamie Merchant, of the Florida Citizens Alliance:
Hernando and Citrus counties recently voted to pull ALA funding and she
wholeheartedly supports defunding this organization.
The ALA and its current president have a history of promoting explicit LGBTQ
materials and drag-queen story hours while attempting to censor conservative
voices like Kirk Cameron and BraveBooks.
Its destructive and discriminatory agenda harms children and violates Americans’
First Amendment freedoms while undermining parental authority.
Senator Marco Rubio and others have rightly called for cutting off government
funds to the ALA and are conducting a federal investigation into its
discriminatory practices.
Defunding the ALA only places a Band-Aid on a much larger problem.
Lee County gives $0 to the ALA and these explicit books are still available. As a
board you need to decide how to protect innocent children from accessing this
material by accident while protecting the parental rights of those who see no harm
in this.
Hillsborough County’s Board of County Commissioners has directed the library
leadership and technology staff to come up with a plan to allow parents to opt
children out of borrowing or accessing materials with mature themes. That’s a
very neutral approach she may not wholeheartedly agree with.
She has documents from Senator Rubio and articles and if there’s anything the
board needs in support of this, she’d be happy to meet with them individually.
Ms. Patterson said Tanya Williams is here and has information about the county’s
participation with the ALA so you can get the facts about our relationship with the ALA.
Ms. Williams told the BCC:
The American Library Association’s mission is to provide leadership for the
development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and
the profession of librarianship to enhance learning and ensure access to
information.
From a public library perspective, there are core values, including access and
confidentiality.
Collier County’s library division is a current member of the American Library
Association and has been for many years (21).
Our current annual membership cost is $1,565 and it renews annually in January.
We are paid through the end of the calendar year.
Our membership includes access to professional resources, publications, tools,
training, development opportunities and continuing education. That includes, but
is not limited to, advocacy, legislation, grants, scholarships, conferences and
October 3, 2023
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events, education and careers, various tools, publications and resources, which is
our specific benefit.
We are not aggressively involved with the American Library Association, so the
benefit is we get a 50% reduction in conference registration rates and a 10-15%
reduction in the cost of promotional and professional materials, including print
books, eBooks, online courses and trainings.
Based on recent events, the Florida Department of State Division of Library and
Information Services is not an ALA member.
We received notification last week that beginning with the fiscal year 23-24 grant
cycle, the Florida Department of State will not accept any Library Services and
Technology Act (LSTA) grants with project activities associated with the ALA.
Collier County doesn’t generally apply for LSTA grants that would involve the
ALA, but our library consortium does. They help sponsor attendees to
conferences. However, we were told LSTA grants cannot involve ALA activities.
Citrus and Hernando counties withdrew their ALA memberships and
Hillsborough County, the Tampa area and Manatee are considering it. They have
not made a recommendation to their boards yet.
Our research shows that generally the biggest pullouts are from states. Montana
and four other states pulled their state ALA membership.
Chairman LoCastro asked if that means all counties in that state automatically are
pulled or can each county make a decision?
Ms. Williams said Florida has not been an ALA member for a couple of years, but it’s
dependent upon each county, each municipality. Some counties, like Lake County, have
two independent public libraries. It’s dependent upon each state’s charter.
Commissioner McDaniel said he wanted the list of books that Keith Flaugh said were
not appropriate so we could list those for parents to make them aware of circumstances
that may not be conducive for children to look at. What do we lose if we’re not paying
ALA dues? Is the membership critical for daily library operations? We get commingled
with the school district, and we don’t have oversight over the school district. What’s your
opinion about the roughly $1,500 we pay in dues to the ALA?
Ms. Williams said we get nominal benefits from the ALA.
Commissioner McDaniel said that makes the decision easy.
Chairman LoCastro asked Ms. Patterson if they could put it on the agenda for Oct. 10.
Do we have enough notice? We can only discuss it and take input here, but we have to
make a decision. He’s received more information since he discussed it with her earlier
and other commissioners may have, too. He’d like it to be on the agenda so the board can
make a decision.
Ms. Patterson said it can be put on the agenda.
October 3, 2023
30
Ms. Williams asked if it would be to rescind membership as of Tuesday or not to renew
in January.
Chairman LoCastro said it depends on the conversation.
Commissioner Saunders asked about what Commissioner McDaniel wanted as a
reference for books.
Commissioner McDaniel said Mr. Flaugh said there was a list of about 150 books that
have content his organization felt wasn’t conducive for youth to be looking at, so he
wanted to get that list to provide to staff so if we chose to, we could give information to
parents so they can know what their kids are getting from our libraries.
Commissioner Saunders said he was only asking because he didn’t want staff to think
they had to read the recommendation.
Commissioner McDaniel said it’s not our job to make that determination. Our job is to
provide information and if there is subject matter in those books that potentially could be
inappropriate for certain age classes, we should at least make parents aware.
Commissioner Saunders asked how they’d do that. Staff is busy. I’m trying to
understand what we’re going to be asking them to do and how they’re going to do that.
Ms. Williams told commissioners:
To educate and make information available regularly about what’s classified as
banned books, we have a running list of books that’s regularly brought before
boards and school boards for reconsideration, and were deemed banned books. To
Kill a Mockingbird is on the list, as well as many others that we were tortuously
put through in school.
Public librarians continuously educate parents to say that it’s front and center on
our website. If the board wants to instruct us to look at possibly doing that, we
will do that at your direction and can generate a list.
She doesn’t know if the list of 150 books mentioned earlier was from the public
school system, media centers or in relation to the county’s public library.
For visual materials such as DVDs, if you’re a minor, you’re not allowed to check
anything out above a G rating without parental consent, so from a visual
standpoint, we have a mechanism that keeps minors from accessing anything
above a G rating.
Chairman LoCastro told commissioners:
Our main goal on Oct. 10th is to make a decision on the ALA.
He doesn’t want to prematurely lean one way or another, but you answered one of
his questions. It sounds like we paid and it’s about to expire.
If we decide we don’t want to continue with the ALA, he doesn’t believe we’d let
the membership run its course. We would send a letter to say we’re no longer a
member and they can keep the $15 for the last 1½ months. Just letting it run out to
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31
the end of the calendar year is probably not the most responsible thing we can do.
It’s not the most aggressive thing. The most aggressive thing would be to end our
membership immediately. That’s what other counties did.
If we are able to attend conferences because we’re a member, how many have we
attended over the last couple of years so we know we’re making the best decision.
If we hear we went to one event and got a 10% discount, our decision may point
in a certain direction and it’s not imploding our service to residents or making a
big change to the library.
Commissioner Kowal told commissioners:
To simplify the process, if we created a list for the public, maybe 50% of will see
it and 30% will read it.
Can we do it at the source, like the sign posted in the library that says you must
request these from a librarian, who will hand them out? That way, they’re going
to be given to an adult.
If an irresponsible adult leaves a book out and a boy comes with a stack of books
to check out, the list is a red flag, so when they scan it, we can take it back.
We could take care of the problem in-house and not go through a giant
production.
We can make a simple poster they’d see when they walk into the library to say
this is a requested book, you must be an adult to request it and a librarian will
bring it to you.
Commissioner McDaniel said he’s not looking to make work or suggesting we ban any
books. It’s not his choice what your kids get to read or don’t get to read. It’s not the
government’s choice to do things that Mr. Flaugh and others find offensive. It’s your
choice to guide your children as you see fit. He doesn’t want to make a production, but to
make parents aware there may be inappropriate content in these books.
Commissioner Hall said he loves the idea of only allowing those books to be requested
by an adult. If it’s determined by the ALA, he’s for being away from the ALA.
Chairman LoCastro told commissioners:
It also would be good to bring up on Oct. 10th how long Emily Drabinski has been
the leader of the ALA and when she’s leaving. This is a 12-month position.
Part of our healthy discussion is to make an educated decision. He strongly agrees
we don’t want to make a premature decision.
Was there an issue before she took office? Did they have somebody as president
that we may aggressively disagree with, but she’s exiting in 30 days and they’re
about to put in a Catholic priest or a nun in charge of the ALA. He noted that was
a joke, but is it the organization or the person?
Was the ALA wonderful before her and were we proud to be part of it?
Ms. Patterson said we owe Commissioner Saunders an update on the conversations
about selecting a consultant or someone to help us start the zero-based budget, but she
can leave that up to your discussion.
October 3, 2023
Chairman LoCastro told the audience that today was about spotlighting what we do,
especially in light of the decisions we made on the budget to ensure we're spending
taxpayer dollars wisely.
3. Adjourn
There being no further business for the good of the County, the meeting was adjourned by order of
the Chairman at 12:21 P.M.
COLLIER COUNTY BOARD OF
COUNTY ISSIONERS
Rick LoCastro, Chairman
ATTEST:.,-
CRYS " N IL, CLERK
4
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These minutes were approved by the�6mmission/Chairman on // I� /2o
(choose one) as presented, ,/ or as amended
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