02-26-2014 Council Agenda - Laserfiche WebLink

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can be five or ten years. There are some additional costs that come with the extra work in years 2 -5 or 2 -10 but staff believes the added warranty offsets those costs. Also, in comparing the quote from SEH to traditional design - bid -build jobs the price is right in line and, in some cases, lower than the traditional method bids, even with the added expenses in the added -on years. There are not many firms that are doing design -build work but staff wanted to talk to another one to make sure the pricing was in line. Staff contacted Utility Service Group, which is based in Atlanta, Georgia and has a local representative. Utility Service Group (USG) traditionally has set up lifetime contracts with smaller cities in this part of the country. They have painted thousands of tanks nationwide and are a subsidiary of Suez Environmental, a global water and wastewater company. The representative from USG inspected the tower and put together a scope of services that is nearly identical to the scope provided by SEH. USG proposed a lifetime contract but staff rejected the idea based on too much uncertainty in the future and having the City's money tied up in a long -term payment plan. USG then proposed a similar five -year plan to the SEH plan. The difference was USG said the City could pay equal amounts over five years interest free. The USG proposal was less expensive but the company was not as well known in this area. There are no cities in the Metropolitan area that have used USG for their tanks. The closest staff found is in St. Francis, MN. The other unknown was the contractor doing the work. USG was originally not willing to divulge who the contractor was going to be. The City insisted on knowing so reference checks could he made and USG relented and said that Arndt Enterprises from Iowa would be the contractor on the job. USG provided 11 references for Roseville and Little Canada to contact. Roseville was able to contact four and Little Canada was able to contact 4. Most cities were satisfied with the work that was done by USG and Arndt. Staff did talk to one city in Abilene, Kansas that found some deficiencies that were missed by the USG inspectors. Other cities mentioned overspray issues and difficulty in getting USG back to perform inspections or other work. It's difficult to compare tanks when the sizes and scopes of work are different but the feeling staff got was they did good work for the most part but the inspections may be lacking. It should also be mentioned that an Arndt employee died in 2013 after he fell while painting a tower in Iowa. It was likely a freak accident but OSHA did issue citations to Arndt as well as USG. The inspection issues caused staff to look into getting an independent inspector to inspect the work performed by Arndt just to make sure that everything checks out. Both SEH and USG inspect their respective contractors work and there could be a potential conflict of interest, but both insist that they are responsible for the work during the warranty period and their reputations are on the line so they insist proper inspections are being performed. Staff contacted an independent inspector, Kollmer Consultants, to see what the price would be to inspect the work performed by USG /Arndt and the price was $38,200 for full -time inspection services and plan and specification review. 3