Survey / Inventory for small city ???

[M.D. Vaden]

So a small town in our area is sending emails because they want bids from arborists to conduct a tree survey inventory.

They list the miles of roads and number of parks. Between 4 to 5 miles or roads.

They wrote that they want to revise an old tree plan.

But then I'm thinking - so if you don't know about how many trees they have, how are you going to set a price? So much per hundred trees?

Anyone bid on something like this?

Do they usually have someone in mind, and are just wasting a few hundred dollars worth of other arborist's time just to meet their quota of getting like 3 bids?

They also wrote:

The proposal should include proposed processes, timeframe for conduct of the inventory, and delivered product. Qualifications should be presented in the proposal as well.

Seems that they should be stating the processes that they want. Otherwise, why not just state the desired results, like: genus, species, height, diameter, visual damage or problems.

 

[ASD]

if you are not their "BOY" do not wast your time most citys have a go to guy

 

[John Paul Sanborn]

if you are not their "BOY" do not wast your time most citys have a go to guy

Sounds about right, they wrote the bid call so that it was specified for a certain company that may have the old plans on file, or has worked with the department before.

My Dad was a civil servant for 40 years. He has a story where he wanted a certain briefcase for his people to have on rounds. City requirements were to submit a requisition form for the purchaser put it out for competitive bid. He wrote it so tightly that only the case he wanted would fit.


In this case it looks like they wrote it so an uninformed company would have to conduct the survey beforehand. Though you may be able to get a leg up via Google Earth.

Seems that they should be stating the processes that they want. Otherwise, why not just state the desired results, like: genus, species, height, diameter, visual damage or problems.

I think they are looking for weather it would be a walking visual, driving, GIS, lat/long vs street address....

Between 4 to 5 miles or roads.

call it 12 miles of walking for estimations sake, how long would it take you to tape and note all these trees on a chart, condition, quality, hazard, ROW compliance...

My OTC map program has muni boundaries on it, this could be overlayed onto the Google map for the proposal, stating that you would use "official" maps provided by the client for the finished product...

With a little extra legwork, it may be doable

 

[BC WetCoast]

It looks like, from your quotation, that they are looking for a proposal which is very different from a bid/tender.

When I was doing construction management for a municipality, we would send out a Request for Proposal to the consulting design engineers. This would give a vague description of what we wanted designed, time frames etc. The proposal from the engineers would then include, their skills and ability to do the job, past project experience, proposed methodology (maybe an alternative approach) and a proposed budget for the design work. The proposal would then be evaluated by a team.

It's then up to the evaluation to decide what they are looking for in terms of talent, experience, price, ideas. I know when I evaluated proposals, I always looked for design teams who do some thinking about the project and proposed a variety of solutions, (Just don't give so much information, that it can be stolen and given to another proponent) rather than a firm that just prepared a package of fancy brochures.

Once the design was done, then it would go out to construction tender. In this case, the job was tightly defined in terms of materials, construction techniques etc, so the only difference between companies was price. This would be purely an objective decision - low price wins (usually).

In this case it looks like they want a proposal, because they don't have a clear idea what they want done. I could be interpreting your message wrong. However, propose how you are doing to do it (GPS vs paper) what data you will collect and then offer a price. You should have a rough idea as to the number of trees (eg how many trees / block * # of blocks)

Just as comparison, I've done a number of large inventories. I can do on average 150-200 trees per day, including visual estimation of height and diameter and crown radius, visual observation of defects and other issues, treatment requirements and species. I also map the location either with GPS or a paper sketch map. I put the data either into a tablet computer or on paper. It would be a bit slower if I had to take photos of each tree, or hammer on ID tags.

If I record on paper, then more time is required by a typist to retype my notes.

Writing the report will take you about 50-60% of the time it took to collect the field date (eg 2 weeks of field collection --> 5-6 days of report writing).

This is based on projects with 2500 trees on the property to inventory.