MINUTES OF JOINT COMMITTEE MEETING

DOUBLE BRANCH AND MIDDLE VILLAGE
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT DISTRICT

A joint committee meeting of the Double Branch Community Development District and

Middle Village Community Development District was held Monday, August 13, 2018 at 5:00

p.m. at the Plantation Oaks Amenity Center, 845 Oakleaf Plantation Parkway, Orange Park,

Florida 32065.

Present were:

Cindy Nelsen	Double Branch Chairperson

Chad Davis	Double Branch Supervisor
Barry Morton	Double Branch Supervisor (by phone)
Scott Thomas	Double Branch Supervisor

Tom Horton	Double Branch Supervisor
Rocky Morris	Middle Village Chairman

Mike Reynolds	Middle Village Supervisor
Rod Swartz	Middle Village Supervisor

Mike Steiner	Middle Village Supervisor

Shawn Vick	Middle Village Supervisor
Jim Perry	District Manager

Jason Walters	District Counsel (by phone)
Jay Soriano	GMS Community Manager

Three Employees of Two Vendors

FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS	Roll Call

Mr. Perry called the meeting to order at 5:00 p.m.

SECOND ORDER OF BUSINESS	Review  of  Proposals  for  Landscape  and

Irrigation Maintenance Services

Mr. Perry stated in years past the Districts have used separate contracts for their landscape services but they have in the past utilized the same contractor for both districts. That's not to say they have to do that now or in the future. The purpose of this meeting tonight is to review and discuss the three proposals that were received. The three proposers are all qualified and they are TriMac Outdoor, R&D and Duval. They have provided copies of their proposals and staff has gone through them. You also have a ranking sheet that shows the mathematical scoring of the pricing in the proposals. We're not asking you to grade these tonight but we're asking that for your next meeting in September you grade those so we can

August 13, 2018 Joint Meeting	Double Branch and Middle Village CDD

rank them during that meeting and move forward with negotiations in regards to the contract. Tonight is an opportunity for both boards to discuss these proposals. Jay will go over them a little bit. I'm sure some of you have some questions you have not gotten answers to so this is an opportunity for the boards to interact and discuss them. This is a workshop so there is no formal action to be taken or voted on tonight. We were just looking for some direction on how the boards were looking at these proposals.

Mr. Soriano stated we ended up having three vendors drop off proposals which is a little less than I would have liked. We had seven go through the tour all together. I felt a little bit better as I looked through the old RFPs. If you noticed I sent out a revision, not just with our current contract, but with a low cost point from our last RFP. For Double Branch you guys had four that turned proposals in so there were a few that dropped out. Middle Village only had two. If you guys recall, a long time ago we were going between Down to Earth, who is our installer, and Duval who is here. Middle Village had some issues in the past. We had an RFP that changed hands so I know that played into the minds of some of those vendors, but one thing we really tried to get them to understand this time as we were doing the tour is that I would prefer them to review both packets and drop off for both districts and give us the best price for both of them. Whether they win one or the other or they get both we want the best price they have for Double Branch and the best price they have for Middle Village. The last time we did the RFP we set it up different where they gave us those, plus a whole other set of numbers in the event they won both. It's really, what can you do best for us overall. I checked all three out. All meet the minimum requirements. They are all commercial vendors that are in the area. We do have some history with the vendors that went through this tour. There's one that I don't have a lot of information for you but they dropped off a great packet and you guys should be able to go through and see references and the properties that each one has in the area so you can take a look. You can even contact some of the staff that is onsite for management, not the vendor themselves or their foreman that are out cutting the grass. If they have staff at the front desk you can always talk to them. With that being said, a lot of it is going to end up being subjective as you look through the packets. Grading them on personnel is hard because a lot of them have enough people as far as numbers so some of that would be information you could get from either staff here or some of those references that you contact; the same with understanding scope of work. That is a big packet and I believe all of them, even the ones that

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dropped out, understood what is expected here. The easy one was price and I already did that for you. That is the mathematical equation for part of it. The other 20 points is really just reasonableness of price. I would've liked a lot more vendors so that it gives you a better market. It is hard to pick that pricing you may like when it's just three, especially when you go through all those numbers that I pulled out of the packets and look at everything from all of their cuts to what it costs for each application of fertilization or just a three gallon plant. I've broken all of those up on that cheat sheet for you. Still, with just three companies it is hard to spread those points out and figure out which ones you like better. Some of this will be subjective so some of tonight is just discussion on what you guys have seen so far and if you guys have questions for Jim, Jason or I. The one thing I ask for tonight is not to discuss the points yet because we're going to grade them later but as far as what you like and didn't like, that's the discussion we want to have.

Mr. Morris asked Jim you said in September's meeting we will be making a decision? Mr. Perry responded yes and the reason we're not asking you to make a decision now is

obviously it's a workshop, but also based upon the discussion tonight you might change your mind on any of these.

Mr. Morris stated I know an issue at least for Middle Village, I would assume it's the same for Double Branch, is currently we have an issue with invoicing where it's a constant having to go back and draw our current vendor back to the contract and I don't know if they are intentionally trying to overlook or what it is but that's a big stickler for us and I'd rather not take your time away from that and I would just like a higher level of integrity from the vendor.

Mr. Soriano stated both boards have talked about that before. I have gone back and revised invoices and I don't know that they're trying to overlook it but it is extra work. This is a real low dollar current contract but at the same time it's something they should have familiarized themselves with. I have talked to them about that and they are much better but it has been a little bit of work to get to this point. That is also why I talked to you guys before we even started this process months ago about getting rid of that extra experience notch that we always gave to DTE. DTE was our installer and they had been here for 13 years. They kept the same rates year after year and that has changed. It is a different company that's here.

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Mr. Morris stated I didn't look closely at it but I know we had discussed before about sod prices and that would be maybe not in the scope at least but for additional sod. Is that outlined in here?

Mr. Soriano responded it is. Double Branch, yours is smaller. You have two pages of those cheat sheet numbers. Middle Village, you have four. Near the bottom on your fourth page after that three-year total you see the sod is Bermuda and it spells out St. Augustine and Bahia but it also has in there the all inclusive price for sod including labor. I told you that number would go up and that is what we've seen here but we've seen one or two that are still kind oflow. There was a .35 cost in there.

Mr. Steiner stated that's what I was going to bring up is the fact that across the board there was such disparity on sod prices with a high of .83 and a low of .35. Two of the vendors were somewhat close but then you go down into the plants and trees and it shifts. Looking at the packets I assume that everybody can do the job. The problem is that I'm not sure everbody understands the task.

Mr. Soriano stated especially the extra work. That is the hard part. They have a contract here so they will be held to a contract. We saw this when we went through the sod issue just a couple months ago that sod is much higher right now than that. If you can get it at .35 that's not including installation. I've heard of cases where people are getting it cheap but it's not easy right now and you're not going to get it stripped and laid so for them to have done it they would have been doing it like we're paying for the sod but they're paying for all the labor. The contract portion if that's the case, that's the price they put out there. Those three-year numbers is what we have to hold them to and what they will agree to. If there is an issue with any one of those vendors not meeting those minimum requirements that are in the contract that is where we can hand it over to Jason if you have any questions about that process. If they're not meeting minimum requirements they are not going to be here. As far as the extra we want to do or switch things out I want good pricing there and they have to really understand that. Some of those do concern me but since it's extra I do believe we're allowed to ask them once we award for clarification to make sure they understand, you've given us .35 that is what that sod is going to cost you. We've had that problem in the past, even with our current contractor. We spell out the complete cost to replace a controller and in there it's the complete pricing. We ask for everything so this is what I expect, not this price plus another $1,000 for hours of labor so

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they have to understand that. We can verify that portion afterwards but right now as far as the three years that is the most important part. I do have concern with some of those prices in there for the extras so we would want to double check with them on each one of those. When I went in and broke down those cheat sheets if the sod was .35 there's no way they are getting those thousands they say they are for the normal $10,000. It just didn't add up correctly. For this process here I can't imagine I know what they were thinking when they were giving me the three-year total. I have to go by the numbers they gave us. Right now market price once you strip and lay is going to be closer to .70.

Mr. Steiner stated in each of the contracts there is an install line for the sod which I thought was just strip and lay and if that's the case the .35 one is .60 a square foot so you're looking at .95. The other two also went ahead and included pricing. One was an hourly rate and one was just per square foot. There was such a disparity in the starting points but then when you start looking through the plants and the trees you go from $575 to $1,200 for one tree. That's a big difference.

Mr. Soriano stated it is and more of that I can promise you is going to fall under labor. Most of these when I looked at the cheap end was just cost for the product. We can get those trees for cheaper. If we were to go and buy them ourselves a lot of times we could get them for $500 for certain trees but I'm not putting them in so they have to add that labor rate and I don't believe they're adding the labor rates to some of those. If they want to eat the cost on it, that's up to them. That's the number they gave us. It's a one-year guarantee for all of our plants.

Mr. Horton asked why aren't some of these things that happen every year included in the costs when you added it up? For example the pine bark we put out twice annually. Why wasn't that included in the total?

Mr. Soriano responded it's supposed to be. That's the way DTE used to do it when they were here before. When you looked at those extra prices below with the pine bark it matched up to square footage and our twice per year. It doesn't mean they didn't decide that for their contract amount they're going to make it cheaper but for the extra amount we ask them to itemize they're going to put another cost. I can't say that I know for sure what each one did but if you look through there each one was a little bit different. I believe it was on Double Branch they left out a couple that were $0 ones and that's because they said it was included. There were a lot of things that were included but we asked for extra so I wanted that pricing in there.

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Mr. Horton asked you're saying you left out the pine bark and stuff like that that's going to be in there anyway?

Mr. Morris responded to Tom's point Jay, could you help us out with that calculation? Maybe you could just email it to us where we could compare apples to apples.

Mr. Horton stated I did a quick down and dirty on the things that they were probably going to do and it varies anywhere from $124,000 up to $161,000 so it was about a $40,000 difference in there and it makes a difference on the pricing when you look at it. You really have to take it into consideration because it's going to happen. They're going to change out the flowers four times a year, the mulch twice a year, etc. They've already given a price for it so I think it should have been in there.

Mr. Soriano stated but it is in the total annual price.

Mr. Horton asked what are you talking about? That's on the second sheet. I'm talking about just Double Branch. Maybe Middle Village is a little bit different. It gives you the prices but it's not included on your sheet here where you totaled it up.

Mr. Soriano stated I gave you an itemized spreadsheet. That's just the three-year total for you to look at quickly, but then you have another page. Those were in there and I think that's what Mike was referring to.

Mr. Horton asked on R&D's submission the three years that they put in there the first year was repeated twice.

Mr. Soriano stated two of them were like that. There was one where did it both on the Double Branch and Middle Village side. Tri-Mac was the only one that changed for the three years and it was for the labor for cutting. Nothing else really changed so I would think that's probably their cost for labor. That's the only thing that I can see going up. If plant prices go up, unfortunately that would be something they would end up eating. R&D and Duval were the same all three years. That's usually what we see in the RFP. They don't go through year by year, probably because it's such a large packet. They do one year with all of those itemized prices and then they just give us three pages full of it.

Mr. Steiner stated it seems like at least labor you know is involved. If they're getting it all up front how much over have they gone to meet that requirement?

Mr. Soriano responded I had a little bit of concern with that too on all of them, not just on labor. I like that idea from Tri-Mac but here we had an issue with R&D on sod. We know

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things get more expensive. I would have probably planned a small percentage on some of the costs for plants or anything like that. It would be great if they can provide us with something cheaper because they will look like heroes if they gave us a cut rate from their contract but most of the time things go up. It's a three-year contract and as long as we're happy and they are satisfactory we just do a one-year extension for a total of five years all together. A lot of those prices can change five years down the road.

Mr. Morris stated looking at these it's the same work and same scope. Does it give you pause to look at over a $100,000 difference in pricing between Tri-Mac and R&D?

Mr. Soriano responded it did until I looked at that last RFP and that's why I included that for you guys, not just our contract rate but out of all of those companies that dropped off bids last time Double Branch had four and Middle Village had two and if you look at the lowest one, it matches where our lowest one is now so they're a couple thousand dollars more for the one now but that means they think they can do it.

Mr. Steiner stated the other thing that was asked in there, and I guess it's something for the future because I don't think we can do anything about it now, there was a request to provide the equipment they have and where it's located. All of them identified equipment but the downside to it is the fact that based on their current contracts because all of these companies have more contracts, some down in Orlando, what equipment will be applied to us would have been more beneficial.

Mr. Soriano stated that would be language we will have to make sure to include in our next RFP. I even asked the question as I'm going through trying to figure out if everybody meets those minimum requirements. We don't tie it to this location so yeah if they are a big commercial company and they can claim they do resorts in Orlando. DTE did that all the time but their local branch was not that big. You want to look at what is here first but then the other issue is can they get it. If they're awarded and they have this minimum contract, to me if they are a large commercial company it doesn't mean next week they won't have ten extra trucks. If that company can do it they will put it out there.

Mr. Davis stated in the personnel category it seems like all we got was officers. I'm looking at personnel because I'm looking at your equipment, I'm looking at how many jobs you currently have and I'm also curious as to do you have enough people to get these jobs done with your current workload and all we got was Treasurer, Secretary, Founder, whatever.

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Mr. Soriano stated and looking through it's the same thing with some of the past RFPs, even with DTE. All we got was key personnel. We didn't get that they keep a steady 125 mowers on duty all year round, things like that.

Ms. Nelsen stated you know they're going to hire the people if you need them. You can't just have them sitting there if you don't have the work.

Mr. Davis stated right but right now labor is hard to find and that's what I was looking for when it came to personnel was what they have on hand to handle what we currently have job-wise versus taking us on as well.

Mr. Steiner stated along those lines of the personnel, how many people do we have onsite here from the current vendor?

Mr. Soriano responded that number goes up and down throughout the year. At the highest point they probably have anywhere from 120 up towards 200 during the summer. I don't know that they've ever hit 200 but some place this size would need that for different crews.

Mr. Steiner stated the reason I'm asking is one of the vendors stipulated that they would be assigning four workers and a supervisor and that seems awful low.

Mr. Soriano stated that's not their workers. They are way above that. There is just one crew a lot of times that has four or five guys doing one section. They may have a couple crews out here that day or week and then they have to rotate. So they do have separate crews and they're going to have a lot more people. To R&D's benefit compared to DTE before, that was one of the reasons I was told they kept R&D's name because they had a lot more equipment and personnel. I haven't really seen that much of a difference onsite here but just because they have 200 people working for R&D or TriMac doesn't mean they're going to send 50 here this week to cut the grass. They have multiple contracts as you see and they're going to split all that up. They do have that expectation of mowing though so no matter how many crew members they have they have to get everything done for each zone all the way up to five days and then we give them extra days if it's raining or something like that and then there is a maximum of seven days to get this stretch cut, and so on with each zone. They should have enough people to hit that in a week.

Mr. Horton stated the crews that work out here I guess work both sides but are they out here all week long?

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Mr. Soriano responded no, it's basically a five day schedule. I work with R&D to try to get them to be able to have longer days for some of their crews but as long as they get everything done during the week. There have been times, whether it's from rain or holidays, that they work on weekends and that's what I would expect out of any vendor if they're not able to get everything done in a short week but it's normally a five-day week.

Mr. Horton stated that's what I'm asking. How long does it take the crew we have right now to do Double Branch?

Mr. Soriano responded they get five days but it doesn't take five days. Right now they're sharing crews and they get it all done in a week between the two districts.

Mr. Steiner stated in the RFP you stated that they would be out here five days a week. Mr. Soriano stated that was the original expectation because they should be out here at

least five days a week. That's going to include everything, cutting, edging, blowing and cleaning afterwards. If they have to come out on weekends because they're short that's going to be on them. They do have a max for each zone to get done.

Mr. Steiner stated I don't know if it's fair to ask but do you see any red flags? You're the one that has to deal with them.

Mr. Soriano responded to be honest the amount of work has increased since DTE has changed and that's been a two year process. At first they became part of a bigger company and then as the owner left it changed again so it's been quite a time. Looking at the other two companies I can't look at it and say I know the workload is going to decrease so that kind of concerns me. That was another reason I wanted a bigger market so I knew I wouldn't have to worry about counting flowers or making sure everything got sprayed. At Double Branch we have a big concern with the multi-use fields. We spend a lot of time and energy out there. In fact, we've spent more time and money than we should have to. That's one I worry about ifthe new company comes in and we make a change does that automatically mean it's going to get better? I don't know that I've seen that from either one of those other two companies so it's kind of hard to say. It concerns me with pricing. I think a lot of that is we're doing extra work and we really have to watch our landscaping more than we ever have before. The current company has gone up and that bothers me a bit. I expected higher rates but if I'm pulling teeth to do stuff I don't want to spend more money to do that. At the same time, these other companies being that cheap concerns me as well. Am I going to have to pull teeth to make sure

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you have enough crew members out here to make sure those zones are getting done or are we going to get arguments down the road that they can't handle .35 sod. I wouldn't say red flags but at the moment I'm not ecstatic with any one of the three.

Ms. Nelsen stated Jay, I called you with some questions and one of the things I brought up was it was such a huge price difference we can hire somebody to manage and I know that's another person for you to manage to manage landscaping.

Mr. Soriano stated that is a point. The main thing is they have to hit that contract and there's that expectation. They may be hitting minimum but it doesn't mean it's going to look great. As you've gone around to different communities and seen different vendors you may notice one vendor is hitting the minimum contract but for some reason their plants and sod look great but this other vendor is hitting the minimum contract and it doesn't look great. We've mentioned before sometimes you get what you pay for but with that amount there's a lot we can do. Even if they said we•can't handle .35 for extra sodding, we have to do .70, we have more than enough money there that we can re-sod quite a bit of roadway or throw in a lot of extra plants. Once you look at that there should be no reason the place doesn't look good. That was one positive to me. The ultimate to me is going to be price.

Ms. Nelsen stated I remember a number of years ago in Middle Village we tried another contractor and I was very unhappy with the Middle Village minimum. Then again, the owner of DTE was living in phase one and could drive by and if it needed mowing again, it got mowed again so I'm not sure that was fair but it was happening.

Mr. Soriano stated I think that is helpful and it's one of the things I've talked to our current contractor about is they came to me when they finally looked through the contract and understood what we were really trying to do and it was a concern that some of this would cost us extra money. That was what Bill was good at. He knew what areas you really had to pay attention to, what the priority areas were and what we could save money on. He may have been the only one to really have been able to do that well so ifthat meant costs went up that's one of the reasons I expected that cost to go up. If you look through the personnel that is a positive for Duval because if you remember that is the other half of the DTE owners that installed years ago so they know it pretty well. When we talked about how cheap it is if you look at the bids of the low price from Duval, as I said that was one of the installing partners, that price was put together by the same people doing the bid for Tri-Mac. They worked for Duval back then when

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they did that RFP so they know those numbers pretty well. At first when I looked at it I was kind of concerned with Tri-Mac being that low but like I said, an employee of Duval installed out here so they know it pretty well. The irrigation costs the most and is a big concern for most vendors when they come out here and see that all-inclusive irrigation. That's where they can really lose money because that's labor out here almost every day replacing heads. It does help to have people out here that know what was installed and how it was done. If they can watch their bottom line there they can make a cheap contract. Once you look at that it kind of tells me both of those lower numbers from Duval and Tri-Mac they don't concern me as much. They may be looking at it like they're not looking to make a lot of money, they want to use it as a mouth piece.

Mr. Morris asked but you're comfortable they understand it?

Mr. Soriano responded they feel pretty comfortable. I would want to be prepared to spend that extra money to do extra things.

Mr. Morris stated I think I would add for Middle Village to Cindy's point it would behoove us to select the same vendor.

Mr. Steiner stated I would agree as long as it is in line with at least some of what we're looking for. It may be advantageous on an economy scale but I don't want to do that on the wrong side of the coin.

Mr. Morris asked Jason, do you have any issues contract wise?

Mr. Walters responded no, I think Jay hit it on the head. There may be a few clarifications but the key will be making sure we transfer all of these bid requirements into that contract and turn to Jay for oversight but that's going to happen regardless. It's one of those things we have to have it spelled out plainly in writing, which we will do, and like with any other contract make sure the performance lives up to that written part.

Mr. Perry stated between the meeting for Double Branch tonight and Middle Village next week if you have any questions feel free to contact Jay, myself or Jason in regards to this and we will rank those at the next meetings in September. Based upon your number one ranking we will move forward with contract negotiations.

Ms. Nelsen stated Tri-Mac I believe has Willowbrook which is across from the high school and Duval has Watermill so you can compare three communities really close so if

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everybody could take the chance to drive through before next month and any other that are

listed you can get an idea of workmanship.

Mr. Morris stated keep in mind Willowbrook does not include outside the fence.

FOURTH ORDER OF BUSINESS	Other Business

There being none, the next item followed.

FIFTH ORDER OF BUSINESS	Adjournment

On MOTION by Mr. Morris seconded by Ms. Nelsen with all in favor the meeting was adjourned.

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