PRE-PROPOSAL MEETING FEBRUARY 27, 2004
I.
INTRODUCTIONS Chairman, Scott K. Lowe welcomed everyone to the Pre-Proposal Meeting and made introductions of the following people: Commissioner James Kennedy Carl Butler, Facilities and Operations Director William O'Donnell, Director of Administration Rich Gigliotti, Warden Bill Garnos, The Facility Group Julie Graham, Solicitor of Butler County David Johnston, Planning Commission Director Commissioner Kennedy also welcomed everyone to this important meeting and stated that this was a very big project for Butler County.
II.
REVIEW OF REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL Julie Graham reviewed the Request for Proposal. This is a Mandatory Pre-Proposal conference. The purpose of this conference is to allow vendors to ask questions regarding this Request for Proposal (RFP) and provide further clarification. Personal attendance at this conference for any representative by any vendors who wish to be considered for award of this contract is mandatory. Vendors will be bound by all explanations and decisions reached as a result of this conference. The County is providing staff, Ms. Mary Jane Double, to take minutes. All attendees will receive a copy of these minutes and a copy of the sign-in sheet. We have also received, prior to this conference, four questions by email and we will read you those questions along with the answers that we have provided. Following a review of the RFP, we will open it up to questions and answers. Butler County is looking at designing and building a new county prison. With the help of our Criminal Justice Planner, Bill Garnos, The Facility Group, we have completed, some pre-architectural programming and planning for the new prison. This indicates 165,000 gross square feet with a total of 512 beds with a potential future expansion of an additional 300 beds. Mr. Garnos has copies of some statistical information to distribute to anyone interested in the logistics of the 512-bed count. The Facility Group is performing services through Phases I and II of the Planning of New Institutions Consulting Facility Development Process for the prison. We anticipate and try to describe three phases in our Scope of Services. Phase I is Budget and Concept Plans and Schematic Design; Phase II is The Design Development, Construction Documents and Construction Administration; and Phase III is Construction Administration. If there are any necessary amendments to the RFP as a result of this conference, copies will be provided to all vendors who received the original RFP. Proposals received by the County must be valid for 60 days following the submission date. Please provide one (1) original and seven (7) copies addressed as indicated in Section 2, paragraph 8 of the RFP. All proposals must ARRIVE at the Butler County Commissioners Office no later than 4:00 p.m. prevailing time on Thursday, March 11, 2004. Proposals received late, will be timed stamped and marked "TOO LATE" and returned unopened to the vendor. Final selection for the architect will be by the Butler County Commissioners Scott K. Lowe,
Glenn L. Anderson and James L. Kennedy. We will retain the option to request oral presentations or interviews. If requested, it will be at the vendor's expense. We do caution you that an award can be made without discussion with the vendor, therefore, vendors are cautioned that proposals must be submitted initially on the most favorable terms from both a technical and a cost standpoint. Elements of the Proposal are contained in Section 4. There are 13 different elements that we ask you to cover in your Proposal. This also includes a Proposed Fee Schedule which is to be contained in a separate sealed envelope inside the submission of Proposal envelope. Please indicate the number of hours at an hourly rate, with a maximum not to exceed cost for each Phase of the project. In Section 4, paragraph 13 it states "The County reserves the right to conduct pre-award negotiations or to request oral presentations from certain vendors with undertaking such responsibilities with respect to other vendors". It should read "without" undertaking such responsibilities with respect to other vendors. Section 5 – Award Criteria not necessarily be limited to, and not necessarily shown in order of importance: professional correctional facility qualification or expertise, price and ability to complete the task in a timely manner. One amendment to the RFP is a page limitation. We ask that you limit your response to not more than 40 pages. Not included in that page limitation is if a vendor wishes to submit a proposed contract for our consideration. If a vendor wishes to just include a statement as to what type of contract they propose for our consideration, i.e., a typical AIA Standard Contract, such a statement is acceptable. If you enclosed a proposed contract for our review, it will not count towards the 40 page limitation. No final decision has been made by the County on whether or not we will procure the services of a Construction Manager. Please price and assume that there will be a Construction Manager on this project. III. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Prior to this meeting, we received questions addressed to Mr. O'Donnell via email. We would like to provide you with a summary of those questions and the answers. 1. Question: Cost estimate for this project. Answer: The cost estimate has not been finalized. We are estimating $30 million for this project. 2. Question: When will this project go to bid? Answer: That is not known at this point in time. 3. Question: What the separate primes would be? Answer: This project is governed by the Separations Act of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. So at a minimum, there will be five separate primes: general, plumbing, electrical, elevators and HVAC. 4. Question: A second question as to a bid schedule. Answer: It was too early to estimate with any reasonable degree of accuracy. 5. Question: Are we interested in engineering and construction management? Answer: The Scope of Services was as it was listed in the RFP: Design, Consultation and Construction Administration only. The County may be issuing an RFP for Construction Management in the future.
6. Question: Could we receive a list of firms that received the RFP? Answer: This list was emailed to the firm that made the request, D'Appolonia of Monroeville, PA. That ended the review of email questions and questions were solicited from the attendees. They follow: 1. Whitney Sanders from STV, Inc. Question: With the CM still in the air, if you would retain a CM would that be at risk CM or a CM that would act as an owner's representative? Answer: As an owner's representative. Question: You mention that the Facility Group has completed Phases I and II and that you were going to distribute some statistics today. Is there a draft report available to us today? Answer: The draft of the final report is not done but I do have some information from the Needs Assessment and the Space Program on what we have done. Question: The follow-up to that then, is the architect you are going to retain under this RFP going to be responsible for revisiting and redoing the program or are you going to come out with a floor plate that we will execute the design of? Answer: We are going to be developing a Space Program. We have a very specific detailed Space Program right now and there are two or three issues we are still struggling with and you will have the advantage of the Space Program and the analysis and narrative that goes along with it. There isn't going to be any concept drawings or anything like that in there. Question: So part of our services is to work with you and the County and develop these concepts? Answer: Correct. It is strictly a Space Program. Question: On item 6 of the RFP you talk about the indemnification and you mentioned acts; could it be that it grows out of negligence acts? Answer: That would be negligent acts, that is correct. And that would be negligent, not gross negligence. Question: You mentioned a cure period of five days, would you consider expanding that to ten days? Answer: We will. We can make that ten days. Question: And if you have a normal standard of care, will that affect the County? Answer: Yes 2. Tom White from Burt Hill Kosar Rittelmann Question: I was wondering if your Selection Criteria, the expertise pricing and ability will be weighed in factors on those? Answer: The Award Criteria as they are stated in the RFP are not shown in order of importance and there is not a weighted criteria assigned to each of them. It will be those three criteria. 3. Jack Bliek from AMEC Construction Management Question: Is there any consideration or requirement for County based AD firms? Answer: No
Question: Just Pennsylvania based? Answer: Correct Julie Graham explained the County's proposed timetable. The County anticipates that we will "short list" the proposals that we receive no later than 30 days following March 11. It could be more quickly than that but we are leaving ourselves 30 days. We anticipate any interviews/oral presentations, occur within the next 30 days and a tentative award of this will be no later than 60 days from March 11, 2004. Information from Bill Garnos of the Facility Group on the Programming was distributed. Question: Has a final selection of a site been made? Answer: No 4. George Hanes from Astorino Question: I have the understanding that there is no drop-dead date for completion or beginning of construction at this point? Answer: Because we do not have the site identified, it is very difficult for us to come up with a date that we can hold you responsible for without identifying what the site is. We did not think it was fair to do that. Question: I understand that, I was just thinking if there was any kind of a master plan on when they would like to have something started and completed by? Answer: Under the terms and conditions of that bond issue that will pay for this project, a substantial portion of the projects funded (including the prison) must be completed by five (5) years from August of 03 which would be August of 2008. We view that date to be an outside limit and truly we are looking for the prison to be completed more quickly than that. Rich Gigliotti added: We have Act 71 funds that have to be spent. Julie Graham stated: To answer your question, no we do not have a drop dead date but we are incurring substantial costs for shipping and housing out-of-County prisoners and the sooner we get into this facility, the more costs we can save. 5. Jessica Forsythe from 4-Most Group, Inc. Question: Is there an opportunity for us to get a draft of the current program? Answer: No, that is the extent of it, just the summary of each component. There is, at this moment, a page or two list of where this total net footage comes from. It is still being refined and we are still working on other issues primarily regarding inmate housing and visitation. We still have some programming issues that we haven't settled yet so all it would be is the back-up detail to this but know that there can and will still be changes to it. I have no problem distributing them but they aren't finalized. Julie Graham asked: Will these changes be available prior to March 11? Bill Garnos answered: No, I do not think so. Even if we get them resolved I am not sure the Commissioners are going to sign off on them by then. We still have some minor issues regarding inmate housing and how we are going to handle visitation in the new facility.
Julie Graham asked: Would it be possible and would it be helpful if we can get the detail other than the inmate housing and visitation? Bill Garnos answered: Other than that there is a draft Space Program that has the break down for each of these components so you can see what is and what is not included in it. I added the distribution of inmate housing on the bottom of page 5 so you can see what the current thinking was in terms of distribution of dormitory double cells, single cells, how many housing pods on. We are still wresting with some very critical program design issues that haven't been discussed and I am not sure we can by March 11. Question: Then, will the architect that is selected be involved in that process? Answer: I think the purpose of having us develop the space program is to help the architect by not having to go back and revisit the many programming issues. We have been working on this program with the County since August or September of last year trying to make sure we understand what the County wants in a facility. I am not saying that it is going to be set in stone but I don't think we are going to have to go back and revisit major issues. There may be areas where we tweek some sizes or square footages or add something here or there but I don't think there is going to be major issues that need revisiting when the program is finalized. Question: Who are the parties in the County involved in the process? I ask this question because a lot of times there are underlying agenda's and things that just aren't right but get carried through in the process. It is a lot easier if you have been involved in some of the decisions and understand them better. Answer: I have been working primarily with the Warden and his staff on the development of the preliminary program. It's been presented to the Commissioners. In September I gave them a presentation of where we are at on the programming process, what things we know that are going into the new facility and what things we are still wrestling with. Question: As the architect, will we be working with the Warden in terms of the project - review of day-to-day work or sign-offs. Will that strictly be through the Warden, Commissioners, through a team effort or how will that work? Answer: That hasn't been finalized we would anticipate that most day to day interactions would be through the Warden, but at critical junction points and from a cost standpoint, there would be sign-offs by the Commissioners. The Commissioners are ultimately responsible for all sign-offs. Question: If we bring a CM on board do you think that will happen in the early schematic phase? Answer: Yes Bill Garnos stated: The handout that we distributed is some of the work we did back in the fall of last year. I just gave you a couple of pieces showing you the trend in the average daily population and the trend line through the data showing how they have been exceeding their capacity and the numbers just keep going up. Same thing on page 2 only on an analysis basis showing the numbers that they have to board out and the spending of over one million dollars this year to board inmates out-of-County. Page 3 is the Preliminary Inmate Population Projects that we developed for planning purposes based on the County's inmate population trends. Page 4 has an exercise where we took those projected inmate population levels and added a peaking factor and classification factor to try to estimate how many beds they are going to need to support those projections. And again, every time we update the data all of this data gets updated and shifts slightly. You will notice that the average daily population
data does not include November or December. For a final report we will be filling the data in through the end of the year and will be running the trend lines and some of the numbers may shift very slightly but it will give you some idea of what we have been looking at for the purposes of planning. Page 5 is the overview of where we are currently with the space program. I think the biggest issues we are still wrestling with involve inmate house, things like how many pods are going to be direct supervision and how many are not, visitation, and what other non-prison components will be included in the building. 6. George Hanes from Astorino Question: From this point forward, if there are additional questions, to whom do we direct them to? Answer: They would continue to be submitted to William O'Donnell. His email address is in the RFP. 7. Jessica Forsythe from 4-Most Group, Inc. Question: Single story vs. multiple story. City vs open space. That has not been determined? Answer: No Bill Garnos stated: I think it is pretty well known that there are two or three sites that have gotten the most attention. The biggest thing that the Commissioners have been wrestling with is the impact of putting it on a downtown site on the block with the Prison Anex vs. a green site that would allow the facility to be a single level vs. having to stack it. They have spent months wrestling with the impact of trying to make a decision on where the best place is for it. Question: When the budget was established as far as what would be projected the structure costs to be those are two entirely different possibilities. Answer: The facility and capacity and program will essentially be the same for either site. But the site decision, I am assuming, will be made probably before the architect is under contract. I assume that in the next month or two we will have a definitive decision on the site before unleashing the architect on it. 8. Vince Johnson from The EADS Group Question: I notice you do not have place for mechanical spaces. Is that basically up to the design group to make a recommendation? Answer: I think we will probably put in an allowance for it. Yes there is going to be and that is going to be one of the softest numbers in this. Question: Is there going to be a central plan or not? Answer: Yes
With no other questions the meeting was closed.