The parks contract is back on the consent list, and this time the price came with it

Monday at 6, Council takes up the $691,000-a-year Tri Scapes parks contract. Two weeks ago Mayor Peyton Jamison asked Council to move it from the Oct. 19 agenda to Nov. 2, saying the contract had been inadvertently left out of the meeting packet, the set of documents Council reads beforehand. City Attorney Ken Jarrard said then that Council was free to act on it that night anyway, and that putting it off “out of an abundance of goodwill” was fine (our Oct. 20 report). It is on the consent agenda again, the list of routine items Council passes together in a single vote without discussion.

How to speak Monday. General public comment is item 5, near the start of the meeting and before the consent vote, and it covers consent items, the Tri Scapes contract included. Fill out a public comment card and give it to the city clerk before your item is called; once the clerk calls it, no more cards, so turning it in before 6 p.m. is safest. You get five minutes, once. Can’t stay? Send an email marked for the record, 300 words or fewer. The clerk will read out your name, address and position, and the whole email only if you attend or show you can’t. Any council member can move to pull an item off consent for its own discussion and vote; it takes a second and a majority. Have a question the city should answer? Reply to this email and tell us.

Why it matters: Tri Scapes keeps Milton’s parks, trails and ballfields, and this deal could run five years, through September 2031, for about $3.5 million before inflation and extras. It renews itself each fall unless either side gives notice. The contract and Tri Scapes’ price offer are now in the Nov. 2 packet (pages 9 to 98), and they answer some of what the Oct. 19 packet didn’t. One piece is still missing: the scope of work, the attachment (Exhibit A) that spells out the job. The Exhibit A in the packet starts partway through the city’s request for proposals, at its page 33, and the scope isn’t in the pages that are there.

What the contract shows.

• The price came down from Tri Scapes’ offer, and the crew shrank by one. Tri Scapes offered $777,737.46 a year. The negotiated price is $691,000, about $86,700 or 11 percent less. The city’s request for proposals, its public call for bids, called for eight full-time workers, and Tri Scapes proposed eight. The final deal has seven: one fewer technician for the “active” parks, the sports parks such as Bell Memorial and Legacy. The price also includes a separate $41,456 line for weekend help.
• Some extras now have a limit. In our Oct. 18 preview, we reported that the city’s memo set no cap on extra staff, equipment and materials. The contract sets one for extra jobs the city orders outside the base contract: $80,000 a year. Emergency call-outs are paid at set hourly rates. Mulch and pine straw are billed at the prices in Tri Scapes’ price list ($44 a cubic yard of colored mulch, $6 a bale of pine straw). Other outside goods and services are billed at cost plus a fee of up to 10 percent. The contract pages in the packet don’t say whether emergency hours or materials count toward the $80,000.
• The City Manager can approve changes without a Council vote, as long as they don’t “materially” change the terms or the maximum price. Apart from new park land the city builds or buys, no change can move the price more than 10 percent.
• The contract’s start date has passed. The contract says its term “shall commence on October 1, 2026.” Council hasn’t voted on it yet. In other words, the contract is written to start a month before Council votes on it. The city’s memo says the current agreement was “approaching the end of its term.”

What it doesn’t show. The packet still doesn’t name the other three companies that bid, what they would have charged or how the four were scored. The city said Oct. 16 that Tri Scapes has kept up Milton’s parks “for many years,” and Tri Scapes’ proposal puts the value of its current Milton work at $625,000 a year. The city hasn’t confirmed that figure. It told bidders the old contract was “based on scope of work,” not a set crew like this one, so the old and new prices don’t line up one for one. We asked the city Friday morning who the other bidders were, what they offered, how the four proposals were scored, what the current contract costs and why the item is on the consent agenda. Communications Director Greg Botelho said the city likely wouldn’t get to those questions and suggested an open records request for the bidders and scores.

The city’s case. Staff call it the result of a competitive process: four proposals, interviews with the top-rated firm, then negotiation. Tri Scapes “demonstrated significant municipal parks maintenance experience, familiarity with the City’s park system,” the memo says. A crew assigned only to Milton, staff say, lets the city move workers between ballfields, trails and nature parks as weather and schedules change, without rewriting the contract. If a required job goes unfilled, the city takes 125 percent of that worker’s daily cost off the monthly bill, and the city can end the contract on seven days’ written notice. The money is in this fiscal year’s parks budget, which began Oct. 1.

Correction: Our Oct. 18 issue gave the Tri Scapes contract on the Oct. 19 agenda a sun (a pass) on the test of whether a contract is approved before it takes effect. That made its Sunshine score 2 out of 5 and the meeting average 4.0. The contract, now in the packet, says its term begins Oct. 1, before that meeting, so it should have been a cloud. Its score was 1, and the meeting average was 3.9.

Everything else on Monday’s agenda, scored, with how to speak: Before the Vote →