Agenda Packets - 2008/04/07 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

• Standard documents - specifications, bid forms, contracts, etc. For a consultant, these standard documents and procedures are all part of their everyday business. 5E. Liability: The City must fully understand that by taking on the role of design professional, in addition to being the Owner, the City also takes on a corresponding increased liability, such as those due to errors and omissions in design. 5F. Specialties of Personnel: Note that consultants offer a very wide range of personnel that are available to work on the project, many of whom are specialists in their area, such as wetland scientists, traffic engineers, landscape architects, GIS specialists, graphic designers, etc. The specialists are coordinated by the general civil design team, so that the specialists can spend minimal, effective time, addressing only the specific issues in their area of specialty. It would not be practical for the City to retain a similar range of specialists on Staff. Therefore, special requirements of the projects would need to be done by the general design Staff. This would likely result in additional time spent due to unfamiliarity with the subject, inefficiencies in not being used to perform those tasks, and potential for lower quality results due to less experience in that area. If the City chose to have any of the specialty services provided by a consultant, that expense would be an additional cost to the project. 5G. Other Cities with Engineering Staff: There are other cities that have several engineering staff personnel. A couple of examples are Woodbury and Eagan. But, just having engineering personnel on staff does not translate into performing engineering design work. Woodbury has several personnel in their engineering department, yet they do not perform any engineering design in house. All of their engineering services (preliminary phase, design phase, construction management phase) are done by consulting firms. Eagan also has a large in house engineering staff. The engineering for some small projects are done by them. However, they still maintain a pool of consulting engineers for the larger, more complicated projects that either exceed their workload capacity or involve specialty services that they cannot provide with their in house personnel. New Brighton does perform in house engineering for their street program. This program includes rehabilitation of approximately one mile of street per year and this program is planned to continue forever. In contrast, Mounds View’s program calls for rehabilitating 26 miles in just 9 years, then terminating. 5H. Tax Revenue: As a minor point: The comment was made at the Street and Utility Program Public Hearing that having City Staff do the engineering would keep the money spent on engineering “in the City”. This is not accurate.