Government Work

Sweet indeed! That's cool I'm glad things worked out for you. Congratulations!
See Ya
Mike
 
Congrats on doing your homework Gigi. :thumbup: On government work, preparing the bid properly is one of the biggest parts of the job.
 
sweet! my bid closes in 8 minutes. theres also another coming up in medford soon. an old street of american elms that create a full canopy over the road
 
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sweet! my bid closes in 8 minutes. theres also another coming up in medford soon. an old street of american elms that create a full canopy over the road


Good Luck sotc!!

Brian, thank you! I moaned and groaned about the bid package, but at the end of the day it is the company and the men that represent the company that won the bid. They are awsome.
 
Congratulations Gigi. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you Willie.

I got a phone call today saying I got my gub-ment job also. It still has to be approved by a bureaucrat one step higher than the one that I'm dealing with.
 
Even if a company doesn't get a contract like this that's been bid on, it's really useful to go look at all the bids after the process (public info). I found it really educational, and it let me know more about my competition & the bidding process.
 
Our county and Modesto city will email all the bidders a spreadsheet with all the bids on it and the scores of any other items like in Gigi's bid with various things given a point rating. Modesto City is the worst for having all sorts of stuff in the bid. They want a transition plan, non-pollution plan, list of all the certs in your company, list of equipment (no equipment over 5 years old), list of other govt. jobs you have completed. The price of the job was 60% of the total with about 10% to each of the other catagories. They then hire a consultant for the city employees and they bid on the project also. This consultant has 3 months of nothing to do except prepare the bid package for the city employees and so they always win. They don't have to pay any insurance as they are covered under the city umbrella. The request for proposals with a sample contract is easily 50 pages. The county was pretty simple, they wanted your insurance info, and how much you would do the job for.
 
How can they dictate age of equipment?? I betch I got stuff thats 30 yrs old in better shape than some 5 yr old stuff I have seen.

Eff them.
 
Ahhh, and it harks back to 'who you know'.
Politics, m'friends. Politics.
 
The City updates their equipment at 5 years and says it is unfair to their tree dept if the other bidders aren't doing the same.
 
What??? I know of no company around here (large or small) that turns equipment every 5 yrs.

Asplundh doesn't even do that
 
Stoopid. I could see my now in front of council argueing that one.
 
I was looking at your avatar. Did you say something? I think she is smiling at me.
I don't live in Modesto so I don't know all what goes on there in their tree dept. I assumed it was normal for a city to do that. I think the whole thing was a Circle J. It was all to show the city council that keeping the city tree dept intact was the most economical avenue instead of hiring a contractor. It was also for the city council to show the citizens that it was exploring ways to cut expenses and not just sitting around with a huge deficit looming. The big tree companies didn't even bid on it.
Only Grover our local large tree company bid on the project besides the city employees. My bid was rejected as incomplete on the transition plan and my equipment was too old. The job was really too big for me, it would be about 4 trees to remove per day. Mountains of paper work. The specs for grinding the stumps was over 2 pages in the sample contract. They wanted all the grindings removed and the hole filled level with dirt. There, that is a lot less than 2 pages.
It is the same contract that I talked to you about on the phone Jonsared. They also wanted one of your company radios installed in their office and maintained at your expense. Hell we just use our cell phones. They wanted a live person to answer the phone at your office, a landline not a person on a cell phone, between 8 and 5 and a cell phone would be acceptable for after hours calls with a guaranteed 2 hour response time. The crap was endless. It would be nice to have guaranteed work for 3 years. It was just a waste of time for me.
 
id check up on them and make sure they are doing 3 trees a day and not cheating on their stumps:D
and by the look of things you dont want to work for them anyway, theyd nickel and dime ya to death
 
They are cheating on the stumps. It was in the contract that the stump needed to be out no more than 5 working days after the tree was removed and I've seen them sit for 3 weeks. There was even some crap in there about the ratio of grindings to dirt in the hole. Like I said the whole thing was just a show.
 
I remmeber that phone call now Steve. It does sound like a Circle J.
 
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