Whether it’s for managing stormwater programs, setting up a stormwater utility, inventorying the stormwater infrastructure, or performing hydrological and hydraulic analyses, municipalities often rely on stormwater consultants to provide services in areas not feasible for in-house staff.The city of El Paso, TX, hired a stormwater consultant for the first time after a major storm event during summer 2006 caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage and highlighted deficiencies in the city’s stormwater infrastructure system.
The city council, stormwater utility personnel, and city manager decided to hire a consultant to look at the stormwater situation and make recommendations how best to handle it.
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Photo: City of El Paso Engineering Department |
| El Paso's major storm in 2006 caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage and highlighted the city's stormwater infrastructure deficiencies. |
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Photo: City of El Paso Engineering Department |
| The aftermath of the storm in one of El Paso's parking lots |
Previously, the city had utilized the services of Malcolm Pirnie’s Red Oak Consulting in its water and sewer rate infrastructure design, cost-of-service studies, and organizational studies.
“Malcolm Pirnie came in, did an assessment of the situation and of the multi-jurisdictional responsibilities, the cross-city departments, cross-functional duties, sharing of resources, and so forth,” explains Nick Costanzo, vice president of business operations for El Paso Water Utilities. “They then put together recommendations for the city council and the public service board, which runs the El Paso utilities, to look at all of the options jointly to see what was the best way to address it.
“In the end, the city council asked the public service board if they would be willing to take on this responsibility along with the water and sewer utility. The board agreed, and the city of El Paso created an ordinance creating a stormwater utility compliant with state law, putting it under the auspices of the public service board.”
El Paso chose Malcolm Pirnie as the stormwater consultant “because we wanted to use a consultant that was familiar with the utilities’ organizational structure, how we do our capital improvement program planning, and how we do our cost of service. One component of the stormwater utility was developing stormwater fees in lieu of property taxes, so that was a very critical component of the process,” says Costanzo.
Many municipalities are at a fork in the road where a decision has to be made as to whether to handle stormwater functions with in-house staff or contract with a consulting firm. At times, budgetary concerns come into play.
“We have a good core group of people who handle a lot of the baseload work,” says Costanzo. “But when we want to draw upon best management practices, that’s where we tend to bring in consultants to look nationally and internationally at what works.”
As such, stormwater consultants have a wealth of experience from which to share.
“We use Malcolm Pirnie to do that research for us, to look at the way different cities handled stormwater issues,” he says. “Some do it through city departments, some through cross-organizational or inter-governmental agreements, and others through stormwater utilities. They put all of that together for us and let us look at it from a macro perspective and also a micro perspective.”
While some municipalities may use a request for proposal (RFP) to hire stormwater consultants, when El Paso brought Malcolm Pirnie in to help address an emergency situation, it chose the firm based on previous positive experiences.
“We had a stormwater emergency where we had major damage that needed to be fixed right away,” Costanzo points out. “The city wanted to act quickly and hire the consultant off any existing contracts we happened to have. Malcolm Pirnie was already working on cost-of-service, rate structures, and organizational components of the utility and developing the new organizational structure.
“So, since we had a contract, we just added on a task order for them, and we felt they had the resources necessary to do the job.”
Costanzo’s advice to other municipalities choosing a stormwater consultant is that, absent of a good existing relationship with a consulting firm, checking references is critical.
“Especially get references using cities within your region and size that have your type of problems,” he says. “Get references on consultants they’ve used for specific issues. That’s always a good place to start. And there are a lot of good national engineering firms you can tap into.”
Personal interviews also are important to ensure the firm has the team that can do the job with the necessary resources, Costanzo says. In some cases, a stormwater consulting company may be so busy with other projects that there’s a potential for one of them to get less attention.
“You’ve got to have a commitment when you develop that task order or scope of work that the resources promised to work for you are available for you,” he says.
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Photo: City of El Paso Engineering Department |
| The storm created some powerful waterflows throughout the city. |
Developing an understanding about keeping within a municipality’s budget is also important in any relationship with a stormwater consultant, Costanzo points out.
He notes that there can be advantages to using consultants the city already has onboard, if they have the capabilities for the new work the city needs. “You get some synergy there, because they know how you work, you know how they work, and maybe you can maximize their resources if they’re working on multiple projects for you. That’s another way to cut your costs down.”
With Malcolm Pirnie’s help, El Paso is set to initiate its stormwater utility this year.
“Our consultant has been with us every step of the way,” says Costanzo.
Meanwhile, in Austin, TX, most stormwater work is done by consultants. The city’s stormwater section is in its Watershed Protection and Development Review Department, which has hired numerous consultants throughout the years.
“We normally do the preliminary analysis in-house, but we don’t have the capability here to do the designs,” says Mapi Vigil, supervising engineer for the department. “In more than 90% of the cases, we hire an outside consultant.”
Consultants perform everything from broad to specific program tasks, says Rosie Truelove, Austin’s contract procurement division manager.
Additionally, the city uses rotation lists; consultants are hired for a broad scope of services and then get specific assignments as work comes up.
“It depends on the workload and what we’ve got going on,” says Truelove. “Here, in Public Works, we have in-house design teams that will do the design and engineering work for many of our projects, and if they’re not available, we’ll look to an outside consultant.”
Austin’s Watershed Protection and Development Review Department is charged with overseeing flood control, erosion control, and water-quality benefits, says Vigil.
“We hire consultants who have expertise on their team for those three missions that we have in the department,” she says. “The work includes fixing a channel that is being eroded, building a retention pond, fixing dams, building water-quality ponds, and also doing preliminary engineering or feasibility [studies] to see what kind of projects we need to do within our watershed.”
Austin uses a request for qualifications (RFQ) process to select consultants and has utilized the services of such firms as PBS&J.
“The way it works in Austin is we issue a solicitation for interested consultants who acquire the solicitation package, come to a pre-response meeting, learn more about the project, and then submit a statement of qualifications that outlines their experience and the experience of their sub-consultants,” says Truelove.
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Photo: City of El Paso Engineering Department |
| Water coming over the banks of the Rio Grande due to heavy flooding |
Austin uses an evaluation matrix that lists criteria, which is published with the solicitation. The city uses standardized criteria for all solicitations.
“It’s not as though, if you don’t have five years of experience, you can’t work for the city of Austin,” Truelove points out. “We look to hire the most qualified consultant and anyone who’s interested in performing the work.”
Truelove notes the process from the time the solicitation is issued until the city council approves a contract can take up to six months to complete.
While the in-house professional expertise sets the ball rolling, the elected officials make the final decision on expenditures over $50,000. Most of the RFQs for consultants are above that threshold.
To help ensure that consultants stay within Austin’s budgets for work, the city sets up a series of estimates.
“We have a ballpark estimate of what we generally think the work is going to entail, and we have that in mind as we go forward with the solicitation,” says Truelove. “Through our contract documents, we have a requirement to narrow down and refine that estimate in working with the consultant. It still comes out as communication between the consultant, the project manager, and the staff working here with the city to make sure that we’re not allowing it to get so divergent that we think it’s costing one thing and the consultant thinks it’s costing something else. It takes going back and forth and constant communication about where we’re going for the design.”
To address emergencies, Austin relies on its rotation list.
“We have some flexibility with our rotation list, because those people are already on contract with the city. If we have a flood event, we might look to use someone from our rotation list so we wouldn’t have to go through the RFQ process,” Truelove says.
The rotation list is also used when there are small tasks that need attention, adds Vigil. “We save the time it takes the city to go through the RFQ process.”
It’s important for a municipality in choosing a stormwater consultant to define the areas in which expertise is needed, says Vigil.
“Because of the areas for which we’re responsible, it becomes a little bit more complicated for our stormwater consultants,” she says. “But we are putting very good teams together now.”
As in Austin, officials in Denver, CO, are heavily dependent upon stormwater consultants to execute projects.
Consultants are used for every stormwater-related task except project management for the Design, Construction, and Maintenance Program for the Urban Drainage and Flood Control District in Denver.
“We have a fairly large area that we service—there are 40 local governments under our jurisdiction—and we have a lot of work we’ve got to get done,” says manager Paul Hindman. “Our board determined early on that the best way to do that is to have everyone here at our district be managers, and then we can manage several different projects.
“If you’re doing everything in-house, usually you can handle three, four, or five projects, whereas each one of our managers handles many—50 projects or so—but to do that, we have to rely a lot upon consultants.”
Another reason the district hires consultants is for personnel reasons, notes Hindman.
“If you don’t like a consultant, you make it through that project and then you just don’t hire them again. As the workload goes up and down, you don’t have to worry about keeping people busy. You don’t have to lay people off, and you don’t have to staff-back up. You can do it per project,” he points out.
Contracting the work out also saves on labor costs such as benefits, he adds. The district’s annual budget is about $20 million.
In master planning, there may be 15 projects at any given time, while in the Design, Construction, and Maintenance program, there can be about 150.
The program contracts out to firms such as CH2M Hill, but the volume of work dictates it be spread out among many consultants. Consultants are chosen for all programs, including master planning, capital construction, and maintenance.
The district uses RFQs in an effort to create a database of qualified consultants.
“The RFQ list is just to get them in the system so we have their name, address, and contact information,” says Hindman.
Depending on the size of the project, the district will, on larger projects, expand its efforts to a full RFP to 10 firms and then narrow that down to three firms to interview before selecting one.
“Through the RFP interview process, we pick a consultant based on their understanding of the project and qualifications,” says Hindman. “We try really hard to spread the work around within the Denver metro area. One of our requirements is that your firm must have an office within our boundaries.
“We wait for the firms to market us. When people call up to ask us what they need to do to get projects, I tell them they need to contact my engineers. Find out what projects they’ve got coming up and tell them you’re interested in ones you have the specific qualities to go after.”
The consulting firm may be chosen for a number of reasons: it has the expertise that fits the project, consultants know the location quite well, or the consulting firm may have an established positive working relationship with the local government—“Something that sets you a little bit above the next guy,” notes Hindman.
The district doesn’t rely on rotation lists as it once did some time ago. “When consultants come to you and say, ‘I want to do your work,’ what they mean is they want to do it that week,” says Hindman. “The consultants’ future planning is next month, whereas ours is five years. So we’d say, ‘Great,’ and call them up nine months later and tell them we’re ready—and they’d tell us they’re way too busy because they have 15 other projects.”
The district prefers instead to invite consultants to approach its staff when it has immediate human resources to do the work and an interest in doing it.
While the state of the economy may dictate the availability of a consulting firm, Hindman points out there are other influencing factors.
“What we have found is that consultants decide whether they want to do private or public work,” he says. “Say they’re designing a specific stormwater project—if they have a private client, they may be representing that client, and they may be in to the local government arguing for their private client then two days later, showing back up in the same room, but now on the other side.
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Photo: City of El Paso Engineering Department |
| Doniphan Drive heavily flooded on the west side of El Paso |
“We’d all like to be robots and not remember that they just yelled at me two days ago and thought I was an idiot, but I remember that—and now they’re supposed to represent me? That’s why typically local firms will make a marketing decision to go after private or public clients, and we obviously go for the ones who service public clients.”
One of the jobs which the district hires consultants is for doing the master plan for all of the district’s drainage basins. “We’ve pretty much done all of them, because we’ve been in existence since 1969, and now we’re going back and redoing them because things change. We hire consultants to update those master plans,” says Hindman.
“In the design, construction and maintenance side, everything we do is stormwater-related, so we hire them to rehabilitate long sections of drainage ways—creeks, rivers, and ditches. We also have them design in the capital construction side when we’re going to increase the capacity of a channel—long stretches of drainage ways or large regional detention ponds.”
Among the larger projects in which stormwater consultants have been involved is work along the South Platte River in Denver to get the downtown area out of the flood zone.
Hindman notes that one of the critical areas affecting the stormwater consultant relationship is the construction process.
“The old way of doing things is the tried and true way of the design, bid, build process,” Hindman says. “There are a lot of new delivery methods of getting the project done. The design-build is one that has been thrown around a lot, but there are a lot of different types of design-build.
But while the district has tried to get into the design-build process a couple of times, “The biggest issue with it is trust, because as an owner, you’re giving up a lot of your authority and decision-making to the designer,” notes Hindman. “You have to have really big trust in that design/builder. I’ve tried that twice, and both times, we haven’t gotten all the way to the final product. We’ve baled out somewhere in the process and gone back the design-bid-build process.”
Every project the district does is in conjunction with the local government entity, Hindman says. “If we’re doing a project and it’s us and the city and county of Denver, we will have staff people from the city and county of Denver working with my staff to do a project. On the local government side, it’s hard for them to give up that trust of having a consultant make their decisions for them,” he says.
Hindman believes that although using the design-build process may not save money, it will save time.
“You’re also going to get a superior project in the end,” he says. “With design-bid-build, we’re assuming the engineer knows all, the consultant knows all, and he’s going to put out a perfect set of plans—and that’s not reality.
“Whereas with design-build, the consultant and contractor work on the same team, so the consultant can throw out ideas and the contractor can say, ‘That’s kind of crazy, but if you change just this one thing, I think you can make it work.’
“Those conversations as a normal way of designing a project don’t happen because, legally, the designer can’t talk directly to contractor and try to design something with the contractor, because then it gives the contractor a competitive edge. So they’re restricted in talking with them.”
Hindman’s advice to anyone hiring a stormwater consultant is to consider the consultants themselves.
“The main thing is the people, not the firm,” he says. “What drives me the craziest as issues come up is to find a consultant who gives you solutions to problems. A lot of times, a consultant will tell me, ‘We found out XYZ but it doesn’t work,’ and then they sit there and stare at you.
“I say, ‘You’ve been working with the project a lot longer than I have. Why don’t you at least give me a recommendation—one or two things that might be possible—and then I can pick from those to do.’ How do you find that in a consultant? That’s the Holy Grail all of us owners are looking for. Some people have it and some people don’t.”
Thus, when he’s interviewing consultants Hindman says the primary trait he considers is their listening skills.
“If someone’s not listening to what the issues are, they are not going to give you a solution,” he adds.