Agda Pkt 2025.01.27 Joint SA PFA

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Page 2 of 3 City of Redwood City 1017 Middlefield Road, Redwood City, CA. 94063 Tel: 650-780-7000 www.redwoodcity.org for over ten years as the source for information related to the City’s trees, such as maintenance work orders and characteristics. TreeKeeper is developed and maintained by Davey Resource Group, Inc. (“Davey”). When conducting tree inventories, Davey has a tablet that could be used in the field with a proprietary application, Rover, which is already built to interface and exchange data directly with the City’s Treekeeper GIS database. Rover is built to easily input and upload data in the field, with restricted data fields, so it will be more time effective, simpler, and reduce errors compared to updating TreeKeeper directly, as TreeKeeper is a GIS tool and not designed for bulk update of tree attributes in the field. Since Davey developed the software, Davey’s project manager for the tree inventory can also easily work internally with their TreeKeeper support if there are any outages or issues. Rover also has the capability to hold the data before updating the TreeKeeper database directly so that Davey can review and conduct quality assurance of the data through programmatic and human checks before making permanent (and possibly erroneous) changes to TreeKeeper. For these reasons, Davey is uniquely situated to provide the most time-effective and accurate tree inventory process to the City. Per section 2.67.4(C) of Chapter 2, Article VII in the City’s Municipal Code, “support services may be obtained by negotiated contract and without a competitive bidding process, when the City Council determines that, due to the nature of the… support services... a competitive bidding process is not likely to serve the best interests of the City or to result in the lowest price[,]” and “[s]uch motion shall be approved only on the affirmative votes of at least five (5) members of the City Council.” Given Davey’s understanding and integration with the City’s existing record keeping system for its trees, staff believes it is in the City’s best interest for Davey to conduct the tree inventory, since it will likely lead to cost savings from the time efficiency and a more accurate inventory compared to using another contractor. Additionally, while pricing is difficult to compare given the variable cost of travel, the City is not likely to receive a significantly lower cost when conducting its own bid: following a competitive bid process, the City of Burbank awarded a contract in 2024 to Davey to conduct a tree inventory with very similar pricing to the recommended contract ($7.86 per tree for Burbank versus $7.30 per tree for the City of Redwood City). Therefore, staff recommends forgoing the competitive bidding process in the City’s best interest and recommends approval of a service agreement with Davey in an amount not to exceed $281,050 to conduct a tree inventory. FISCAL IMPACT The amount is available and has been allocated in the General Fund to conduct a tree inventory. No additional funding is requested. 6.E. - Page 2 of 19 70