Special Board Meeting

001new york [Music] um i'm going to go ahead and um call for our pledge of allegiance please join me indivisible with liberty and justice for of you all are meetings um sister i'd like to start in honor of uh the intention and so today um i'd like to focus on the expectations of moving forward uh continuing to um grow literally and with our constructions and speaking of children in the playgrounds and all of our amazing fashions and facilities that our children will enjoy in the future so with that intention i will start oh sorry i'm just confirming that you can all hear me um it sounds really like not clear to me what you're saying so i don't know the mic yeah i was going to say that's why i had my handwriting it sounds

002very difficult i just didn't know if it was only on my end but it sounds muffled and hard to hear testing one two three is this better no it's not better a little bit testing testing one two three testing testing is that better minimal it's better but it's still kind of muffled and um like echoey natural echo not zoom echo but like room echo natural echo it's audible it's just kind of difficult maybe the mask is sort of muscly um i don't know is this better that's a little bit better better okay um is it a little bit better or like a lot better kindness is kind of significantly better okay [Music] significantly is good good good we have very good dates this year this kind of significantly is good okay so um then when

003we're speaking when we're speaking let's take off our mask um otherwise uh the recommendations in our county are twitter maps indoors um and so i will be following those recommendations all right so um being that you can hear us better uh trustees speak in the mic um when we speak we're going to go ahead and move on with this process welcome firm we're going to start with item 201 discussion approval of process for interviewing and selection of program management firm we have just uh cerna here who's going to walk us through the proposed uh process that we'll be holding tonight and then we'll move on to uh the public comment before then we go to a vote is just speaking because we can't hear we can't hear and yeah i can't hear anything i thought

004he was setting up or something for board members present here uh i think i think trustee del oro needs to keep her mica open that's the problem leave your mic up open i mean you're not muting yourself we can hear now yeah i i think i don't know if you heard buddy oh can you hear me can you hear me hello hello you can't hear me um can you hear me can you hear me mighty bell i can hear you i can hear you can hear you i can hear your trusty vehicle yeah i can't when like you said when trust microphone is off i can hear jess but when it's on when it's on mute i can't hear anything and i'm assuming i'm assuming what i'm hearing and what you're hearing is also what

005the public is able to hear or not that's right so if that's the case the public is not really hearing anything when stress theater loretta is on i hear you and so if you're speaking and you can hear me right now so you can wait a second can i um get able to share and listen to the audience okay can you hear us uh can you say something um i'm talking right now can you hear me and so what i was saying was first of all if i don't know if what i'm hearing is indicative of the public but if it is then we can't hear jess speaking mr sedna when your microphone is muted i think maribel was saying that but i don't know if you heard her say that either but when your

006mic if you microphone president erella is muted we cannot hear i think other people too but definitely not mr sedna and when you're unmuted i know we can hear mr sedna and i'm assuming we can hear others too all right i will leave myself unmuted should i do a test now will that help hello can hear him a little muffled i can make it work but it's for the public it i don't know if it sounds the same it's kind of muffled is that bitter a little bit okay i'll try that okay okay great thank you would you like something to start over for them okay again as i said earlier uh there are courtrooms before board members present here in the boardroom disney one board member is participating via zoom there are four firms

007who have submitted a proposal and bid the project management firm will be selected by the board the firm will be asked a full of nine questions the firm will have a total of 30 minutes for their presentation the first 10 minutes are dedicated time for the firms to make presentations regarding their birth the remaining 20 minutes will be dedicated to questions and answers the time for both of the 10 minutes and the 20 minutes will be kept on the screen and the firms can see how much time they have remaining each board member has the names of the firms on their laptop that are participating the questions that are being asked and a sports sheet to score each of the firm the scale for scoring the firm is from one to five one being the

008lowest score by being the highest level as i stated earlier you may want to think of this in the context of a grading system so a 1 would be an f and a 5 will be an a board members will score each firm in real time meaning they will score them immediately at the end of each bird's presentation those scores are timestamped and dated on the laptop they cannot be changed at the end of the question the excel spreadsheet will calculate those scores the order of the presenters will be done randomly uh there is a uh envelope there that president has the board member will choose a name that name will be the first presenter that firm will remain in the boardroom and then the next term will be chosen uh randomly and then at

009the end of that we will ask the first to go back into their conference room until carl is on once all the firms are interviewed and stored and tabulated the highest growing firm will be selected then there is an additional piece of the process and that is in the events of a time of the two top firms this is the other feat that the board will be voting on to determine which of the two options they will prefer the first option is there's a time of the top two firms the board has the option of one just rescoring those top two firms for option two is to reinterview the top two firms with additional questions so that is the process being recommended by staffordshire um at this time i believe that the economy will look

010board to vote on on the process as well as those two options in the event that we're taught there's any questions i would be happy to answer we have [Music] second by uh word by president um at this time do you have any specific questions yeah um about the scoring um mr sergeant is perfectly clear on some criteria that's no problem uh how do you um each of you have the names of each of the firms and the nine questions that are being asked with the scale of one to five you can then score them and press the button for the number that you're scoring of each of the questions that it's on each of your laptops and if i can add to that we will we will be getting um uh email with the

011name of the firm that we'll be interviewing um as soon as we pull the name so as mr cerna mentioned um we'll have this envelope we have three trustees each one will pick a name of the firm and then obviously the fourth one will be left um as we pull the name and we know that name depending on the order we will have staff email as the form mr frown we don't have it yet so it will be emailed in the moment also yeah i just described it very well it's okay uh just add it to that piece which i think is a key we will get the form sent to us in that moment you will get it shortly as soon as we pull a name thank you do you have any other questions

012just to remind word president you will also be boarding on one of the two options for the tie-breaking crisis or process um so maybe we'll what we'll do is both first on on the process and then we'll vote on the hydration correct okay so we'll start with that any other questions before we go to a public comment so um we'll say we can help us with public comment at this time do we have any members of the public address support uh yes um can you hear me yeah okay so i did have a couple questions so number one i i'm trying to hear and i can mostly hear but i think mr sedna referenced the scoring um thing and then trusted you mentioned a form that was going to be emailed to us are you

013talking about the same thing so we don't have the scoring thing yet and it'll be emailed to us okay and as each one comes we'll receive that email that allows us to score exactly okay and then we'll get confused with four forms in our email boxes we'll get them in a moment we'll score them as you know for listening depending on the answer okay and then um so i i heard a motion i think from trusty fam but i'm just wondering what what is the motion what are we are we is the motion to approve the process that we got in an email i think during the past week or what um mr sarnath described to us so the emotion is exactly what mr and i just mentioned and um i mentioned it earlier so

014i'm sorry if it's not clear we are first voting on the process once we're done with that we will then vote on the tie breaking yeah and that's the reason why i'm asking is because the process that i heard described by mr sedna is different than the process that i saw in the email that was sent to us so i just want to make sure that i'm voting on the um the correct thing you're voting on what mr said and i just presented to you and us okay it took me two hours to hide my sky because i haven't worn it in two years so thank you thank you for your experience so let me start again very clearly you are reading from the process that he said to the world all right so i

015just want to be very clear because because i know that there are two different ones but i i just want to reassure you that it's the same and i think the only deviation uh superintendent uh um is originally there was some discussion of a rabies here with one depend and there was a decision to change that for one that bond and i think it's important well my question is actually on my question is on number seven because that one it says two different things that says that we're gonna one point says that we're gonna score them individually after each one goes and the other point directly following that says that we'll be scoring them at the end um once all firms are interviewed each board member will provide their scoring so that's the the clarification

016that i was just trying to make sure that i'm clear on because the one that we got sent says we're gonna score in two different ways but what i heard jess saying is just seven a which is each one is scored individually as they do their interview and 7b would then be nullified and so indeed we're not voting on what we were sent we're voting on what is said tonight by mr sedna thank you the differences that you were noticing so that everybody knows exactly what those differences are and you're absolutely right um the themes that were with what president decided that it would be easier and cleaner for each firm at once once you're finished right uh interviewing and submitting that i was also waiting to score all of them together and that was

017just that and you are welcome that's why this board has a process before you so that you can deliberate about it um and and you know if you have some emotions from them any step of these process you're certainly welcome to present that to your peers would you like for me to repeat the process again oh my god let me keep going here um as i said there are court firms who have been proposals of his project management firm will be collected by the board the firms will be asked a total of nine questions uh those questions will be asked by the board uh the firm will have a goal of 30 minutes for the presentation the first 10 minutes are allocated for a general description of your firm the remaining 20 minutes will be

018allocated to answer questions and answers and do as long as answer each board member will have the name of the firm and the question as well as the scoring sheet and they will be scored in real time meaning included they completed their interview they will be scored individually the scoring scale is from one to five one being the lowest five being the highest you can get again the analogy i use for a grading system that you would use in school a one being an m5 being a male scores will be kept and we will be emailed the names affirmed once they are selected to your laptop the questions will be present and the scoring system will be there also those scores will be dated once they're scored and time stamps the excel spreadsheet the system

019that's being used for platform menu will tabulate the scores at the end of each of the interviews the first term again that that will be the order of the firms will be selected will then be done randomly uh an envelope with all the names of the firms in there uh the first form selected will be the first presenter and so on uh once they have all been selected we'll add firm number one that presents will remain in the room and the remainder to enter to one of the chronic journals once all the firms have been interviewed the scores will be tabulated by the platform the firm with the highest point at the end will be the first selection in the event of a time the top two firms and you will have two options that

020the staff is recommending option one is to rescore the top two firms that are tied and you will only be scoring those two option two is to reinterview the top two firm different questions those are the two options being recommended i hope uh make it a little bit more clear but that is not as notable and answer questions um [Music] that [Music] and watching our voice right now um [Music] from videoing so with with that i wouldn't bring what we have here but it's not just a little bit i'm comfortable with the way it is i you want to hold up yes absolutely and again you know and if you want to change that process and that amendment depending on your support uh uh sorry again but can i i think myself and the public

021are having the same experience so we really couldn't hear what uh trustee quintero just said we've been kind of here i'm exposing myself putting my life on the line just so you can hear me now we can hear you now you can hear yes so um the the i i'm comfortable moving forward with i seconded the motion and i'm comfortable moving forward the process is and i understand board president's um uh point of view but i also see that we have a very very fluid process we have people here uh representing to us giving us information and that you know we have multiple organizations or firms coming before us um and at this point they're being compared against each other uh and that we may not want to lock ourselves into a vote and say

022this is it uh right after we just heard from them we may want to hear from everyone and then at the end go ahead and make an assessment uh based on everything we've heard throughout the throughout this evening and so i was just putting that out that i'm willing to move forward the process is but i also see value in holding up to the very end and then voting based on all the information we received [Music] yeah i think um i i want to thank trustee quintero for those comments because i actually feel almost identical to what he said i think i'm okay with going forward as it is but if i um if i had my preference i think that um it would i would probably be able in as just one individual to

023provide a more um accurate assessment of my scores if i was able to hear the entirety of the of the interviews and and kind of get some context and a sense of of the entire field that's before us and then be able to do it on that i want to say if i'm not mistaken in the past that we've done it similar for other things and we've been asked to kind of take notes as we go and score as we go but then we submit at the end before it gets shared with everybody so um that's my feelings i i also would likely support that amendment if they were to come before us on in the motion okay is there an amendment uh are you okay with that amendment the problem uh yes i have

024no problems with you know so i yes so uh amended so it would be still my motion but amended by board vice president from general uh and then vice president second you're good with that yeah i concur with i concur with the amendment okay um all right any other questions comments concerns before we start with this part of the process okay and then we'll go back to the public comments um do we have any members of the public address support [Music] excuse me yes we have miss ellison uh the only speaker miss allison you have two minutes piece of meet yourself when you begin speaking the timer will begin good evening board and uh mr ching and dr bauer i'm alison singlani the president or the the chair of the chair of the citizens bond

025oversight committee i did want to weigh in just a little bit i have read the statements of qualification and i noticed that there is very little in most of those about the way the contractors intend to interact with the bond oversight committee so i am hopeful that they will include in their presentations more information in particular about the process timeline and output for requests for documents or information from the citizens bond oversight committee about things that are happening within the program projects that are happening within the program um i do want to express some concern in the statement of qualifications for trigroup incorporated they mentioned that they will take full responsibility for leading the citizens bond oversight committee including facilitating meetings and delivering required quarterly reports it would be inappropriate for the organization that the

026bond oversight committee is responsible for overseeing for providing oversight for um to attempt to lead the bond oversight committee so hopefully if try group is here tonight they can clarify that and and we can create a situation that is is more appropriate thank you very much [Music] thank you um okay now we'll take it to a vote um i'll go ahead and start with the trustees present here and then uh we'll go to trustee vicarano [Music] okay so passes unanimously now we're gonna go on to the second piece of the process which is um in case of a tie as mr cerna presented and do we need him to repeat that piece just to it's clear or should we have him presented vice president um justin for a second thank you justify mr serna [Music]

027the two options the staff is recommending for the highest rating process is option one is to restore the top two finders we would only be scoring the same scoring system uh based on the same responses the top two high minus option two would be to reinterpret the two top two high primers with different questions so those are the two options that you can have available thank you mr stern and the only thing i will add is um the questions um would then uh be picked by the alternative questions that the trustees have those of you that have um submitted alternative questions that we can then pick the question from that list so depending on which one of the two we choose um do i have a motion for any of the two uh okay and

028present so i i noticed in the event of a time that will use in the ultimate questions okay thank you do we have a second uh vice president second uh sorry i see your hand up if you're seconding feel free to pretend that you're here in person um but i don't know if you have a question comment or concern i had a i mean i did have a question but i think you did clarify it so that um the i i didn't i didn't think that we should do the the first option just because if we're just scoring again on the same questions it's kind of i don't know what we're gonna get from that but the second one as long as we have those questions alternate alternate questions then i think that is the

029way to go to that is the motion and that is a second at this time do you have any questions or comments around that or any of the other trustees okay seeing then we'll go ahead and open it up for public comment at this time mr chavez any members of the public wishing to address the board okay i'll wait a couple seconds in case we're running for that button any no no no okay so we'll go ahead and move on to the boat uh go ahead and start with board vice president trustee aye trustee chavez aye trustee aye and myself i alright passes unanimously all right uh moving on to item 202 interviews of potential firms and selection of desired firms so before we start i'm sorry to interrupt madam president just to remind the

030firms that when they are away there nobody is supposed to be downstreaming thank you so we were going to say that but you might hear it a couple times for a reminder it's okay we're not letting you go yet so um we do have an envelope just to here transparent there's nothing else in here i don't have ten of any ones uh we do have tri group coming kitchell and jenkin gates martinez okay and then we'll just start with trusty chavez and then go down the line and she can help us pick the first firm who will stay and then the rest will go back to the room and uh as brenton and mentioned uh you could please refrain from watching the interview online or having any of your friends text you to tell you

031how to answer because they saw the answer etc etc thank you number one remark one okay so we have firm one uh it will be jenkins gates and martinez so if you can please stay and the other firms if you can wait in the room in the other room um and then we'll call you as you cut that we can go ahead and choose oh sure actually um yeah sure so we know the order so the number one and so just a reminder to the staff um if you can send us the different forms and then we'll be submitting at the end of the entire process for number two so firm number two will be kitchen so um for the staff we're gonna start with jenkins gates and martinez number two will be kitchell and

032number three will be coming and that leaves four as a tripod yes all right thank you very much um and we'll start with jenkin gates and martinez if you can please stay and then the other firm's completely in the other room [Music] yes so we will give the firm five minutes to prep your team yes a deep breath group up uh and uh we'll see you back here at 6 15. thank you in the meantime i know staff will be sending us the forms to submit our submissions so if we can just get them all via email um and then this way as trustees we can check our emails and make sure we have those forms and we're able to access them so five minute break feedback with the firm at 615 as we're setting

033up here thank you [Music] it's like just for me it's easier to mark them the survey hey thank you so much okay uh looks like we have trusty thumb uh vice president quintero and myself so we have a quorum but i do want to wait for everybody else to return we have trusted now we'll wait for trustee chavez call the meeting back to order at 6 17. we are making sure that our audio's on trustee because just a thumbs up that you can hear me loud and clear all right um and then uh firm i'll call you by the name of your firm uh jenkin gates and martinez if you can please make sure okay l g-a-l-e thank you so much jenkins scales and i apologize for that jgm so jjm if you can please

034make sure when you speak um that you speak straight into the mic so it's nice and loud and clear feel free to take off your face mask as i should now so that our public can hear us who are connecting with us um online um and we'll just uh wait for the presentation to be on and trust the challenge to come in and as you are setting up the presentation and we're waiting for uh trusted chavez um just a reminder to the uh board members we will each have the ability to um ask the questions that we submitted that are on the list so um it's uh the name are on there in case those of us are wondering who will be asking what so we'll just go down the list um the one through

035nine um if you have those open and available to you uh i know you have those open available to you trust your family have those open and available to you vice president quinteno um um getting them out okay if i can ask this a question while we wait just to clarify um so we have now the google forms thing available to us and i have it open here but just to confirm so we can score on this but as long as we don't push submit we can be fine and just save if we wanted to do it that way we could just save kind of each tab for each firm and then at the very end when we're ready we would push submit on all of them but um that's kind of how we agreed

036it right that we would admit the scores at the at the very end at the end correct and unfortunately so for us we have we have these in paper we're gonna put it in writing here but it sounds like you have a good system for yourself in keeping the tabs open and you know this is very important for all of us so you know we'll take as much time as we need let us know if there's any issues raise your hand and i'll make sure that we pause um so yes that sounds like a great plan and uh those of us that are here have a printed copy of the questions we can write you know break it up in one two three four so that we identify which firm and your notes and then

037at the end we'll take time to submit a google form for each firm and then get the total at the end perfect okay um any other questions before we move would it be possible to see the questions yeah i thought that's the way we can make sure that i like this here is the port okay with that allowing the firms to have questions on the table yeah sure absolutely thank you yes that makes sense okay and then um you just give us a thumbs up whenever you're ready no pressure we're all waiting on you take your time you know it's our first time back as jess mentioned i forgot how to comb my hair as well all of it but uh we're back and we're happy um you know and we want to keep it

038that way so yeah i think we're all we're all feeling we're all feeling anxious of being back with one another but uh we're happy to be here so as long as it takes we will be patient and we appreciate your support bunion um okay we're good all right um so uh we agreed on the process um is there any questions clarifications around that process or just go right into it okay welcome [Music] we're a small minority old business second generation my father started it 40 years ago and i became ceo uh five years ago construction project management architecture it's literally in my blood uh i live buy it i love it especially the education i been on a board chair for a charter school in los angeles i've been a substitute teacher a coach a

039mentor education and building youth is something that is a great passion of mine uh so they said who are we so jjim we've been we've worked in construction management since our inception and with k-14 schools for the past 30 years so when bond programs first began we were actually on the initial programs for lausd laccd managing their program management the team i brought with me today i have myself mr alert robinson who's the program director and mr toby black who will be one of our program managers also as well you see listed here is david page who will be our senior project controls alert robinson has over 30 years of experience uh he's managed the san jose city college uh bond program uh which is over 400 million dollars at san jose city college as

040well as other programs throughout the bay area here such as oakland and west contra costa toby black has over 20 years of experience he's developed i.t district standards very well versed in dsa and the requirements i needed for those david page as i said he's a guru in everything project controls he's actually he actually teaches program and project controls and was the one to develop lausd's entire system uh some of the projects that we've done you know some of them are within our proposal so i won't spend too much time but i just want to make sure i highlight the experience that we've been able to do over the last 40 plus years we're a small business but have completed some massive massive programs one of them being la unified and their bond programs like

041i mentioned before west contra costa fremont unified and their bond program in which toby was a part of los angeles community college district and their bond programs we were a joint venture partner uh when it was first uh when it first began in 2001 i think and we've been there almost since with the exception of i think three or four years outside of that we've been there the entire time managing their programs uh santa rosa junior college were there managing projects over there for campuses up in the bay area or up up north some of which is the life science life sciences labs and classrooms and also the district-wide security update uh upgrades uh they uh from everywhere from santa rosa junior college to their show and farm uh we are installing cameras video boxes

042call towers everything in which to just help them enhance their campuses so this is what we call the five percent and there's four companies up here um each one i'm sure is qualified some more qualified than others um but what differentiates us uh what we say is the five percent that differentiates us our philosophies and goals and in doing our research seeing the issues that you know alum rock has had in the past it actually irritated us because it goes it puts a bad name with consultants with program management with project management uh it's a distrust and we're here to build your trust for you to say we can trust jgm we want them to partner with us going forward and how we go about that first and foremost is student success madam president you

043mentioned it before and um during our earlier and i was happy to hear you say that fantastic that's the one thing we look at if we're not keeping that in mind student success none of us should be in this room uh it's first and foremost and i preach that and everyone i hire must do that same thing fiscal responsibility again we're well aware of the issues that have been had and the not only do you need to trust us but the public needs to trust us too we know these uh it's coming from bond funds the public has very graciously uh voted for these bonds and not being fiscally responsible is just a method in which just spells doom uh we keep that in mind uh for every bond program that we're on and just

044every public works project that we're on bond or no bond we know the money's coming from the public and we have to be well aware of that third is communication and transparency this goes to the heart of trust can is the information that we're giving you is it accurate is it valid is it up to date and not even just you but the uh the cboc as well the the reports have to be timely and we have to say whether good bad or ugly that the what the numbers are what the numbers are it's it's again going right back to that heart of trust and lastly being community partners we have we're here not to just instruct you on what to do we're not here to tell you what to do we're here to work

045in collaborative partnership with you uh with the board with the public um and it's something that we really take pride in and an example of that is uh at our work with san jose city college they were hosting their first annual golf tournament uh it actually just took place up the road at san jose uh country club we jumped at the chance to be the one of the title sponsors for it uh through actually that we met a gentleman who or a student who we learned is on he's on the basketball team and has a history of working in construction a week later we hired him as an intern that's what we like to do we we don't want to operate in a silo we're here to be involved to have our name right next

046to alamo and give you the information that you need to succeed and becca one and last point i'll make is the swedes have a term that i just found watching at youtube or not youtube but a netflix show uh called yantalaga and that means we don't like to boast we want you to we implore you to talk to those that we've worked for that we're currently working for uh and have them tell you how we do how we operate how we communicate uh so much so that i will that we love to put our references right here on the screen for anyone to call and we actually encourage that so with that once again i very much thank you for your time and look forward to your questions thank you so much and with that

047as i mentioned i was on you i'll repeat that uh with that uh we will go down the list of the questions that we have just as they were submitted um and each board member had the ability to submit two questions and an alternate question so we're going to start off with question number one from clerk ednesto mr gerano if you can please present your question to the firm okay you can hear can you hear me yes okay um so thank you for the presentation and i only have one question i submitted because it's kind of a multi-party so i didn't want to take up too much space but the question that i have is do you have experience developing and implementing a district-wide solar energy program if no what is your familiarity with the

048financing options available to districts and what would your approach and strategy be in developing a solar energy program in alabama if yes please describe your experience and how it would be beneficial to the development of a solar energy program in alamo [Music] okay and i'll take uh this one we've had the privilege of working with several school districts on their solar implementation programs and we've been around since the early days when solar first was introduced and if people remember shamron and people like that actually had a program and you'll see a number of school districts around that have the canopies on their sites over their parking lots so we did a lot of that at west country costa unified school district where i served as not only a construction manager on an elementary school but

049also became the design program manager that was one of the things that we did as a district standard so our approach is to identify the ancillary funds that are available through the state uh to rebate programs that that are out based on what your utility company is having what the state has and then match that money and put that into an allowance that adds to your bond funding amount so we're not taking bond funds to implement the program minimal bond funds will be used we'll be using the state grants and the other things the federal government grants to ensure that that happens plus all the rebates that you get the other thing that we did from a technical perspective we did district standards in consultation with the experts at the time on solar and we

050just we did a lot of solar ready projects where we actually put all the infrastructure in through the bond so that then when people wanted to do solar they had the opportunity just come and install the solar panels that connect up that worked out really really well and today if you go to west contra costa over you know half of the new schools we did have solar there now but they all have the infrastructure to add it whenever it comes available so that's our approach and we would work with your district to ensure what available funds are available here in the san jose area and how do we meet the needs of your maintenance and operations department to maintain this great asset and resource thank you so much and uh being the first question here

051we are supposed to have a timer on screen just to give you all also awesome thank you yeah right on uh jose are you able to help us out with that uh timer on the screen just to ensure that we're all following the same timer and i'm not giving them extra time here thank you so much though for uh taking time for yourself thanks for that so we can just show the timer for a minute on the screen so that i'm sorry two minutes on the screen that we agreed to um so a two minute timer on the screen um next question um and we'll have trustee midfam asking the next question thank you so much and i hope that you all caught that and that there's some sort of mike in the room that's

052catching me thank you mr uh you can uh proceed with your question well begin the board a summary of the cost control and accountability procedures you use with contractors and subcontractors to ensure that a project stays within its allocated budget and timeline to the extent possible on insurance lines with all labor and workplace safety laws well that's a great question and we put in place processes and protocols that address all of these things basically the contract is sacred for each project and we're going to develop budgets with your team hand in hand every step of the way so you know about design phases and project phases so from project identification all the way through implementation we'll be updating budgets every step of the way with you and your team letting you know where the where

053the pinch points are and where the challenges are so it's because it's not our money this is your money and your constituents money your stakeholders money so what we do is just ensure that if there are adjustments we have a documented procedure so it's all transparent that you guys approve the changes not just us unilaterally saying we're gonna spend more money here there or wherever you're going to input that and say and set those priorities and once we get that in place we'll adjust the schedule if needed and sometimes it'll be a credit back so that you look up and we did this in west contra costa you get to add one or two more schools because we saved you money just about the process in which we put projects out to bid etc the

054architects that we choose to work with and identifying the scope of work early on because that's the critical pinch point if the scope's wrong the whole project's going to go cattywampus and haywire just say it's just not going to work out so that's our approach is to be hand and glove and transparent in all we do funding wise and scheduled next question could you name the time has had a conflict with the contractor and elaborate on how to refer and resolve that conflict to ensure the time and progress of the bond finance project go ahead and i'll answer this one um uh i've had the deal in the last let's say 2020 has not been kind to a lot of school districts with contractors oh i'm sorry i forgot it was even on um uh

055i've actually had to deal with that recently uh contractor actually he went over his schedule well he they went over their schedule uh never submitted time impact analysis didn't start the project on time even though we pushed them to start on time and submitting change orders for things that were already in the contract uh one of the things what we did and they were small contractors uh one of the things that we did uh is we sent letters to their bonding company when it got to the point after we tried to work with them multiple times get them going what is the issue what's causing you to not be able to continue the project along and they still just weren't they were being continued to be difficult what we did is we ended up having

056to contact our bonding company get with the district hey this is what's happening this is the issues going on uh he what they weren't paying their subs uh they were never showing up on time this is what we would like to do and go with the district this is our recommendation to deal with this because they are wasting everyone's time and they're wasting money we had we had a specific goal of trying to get a building taken down uh within a couple of months we had another building going in but they just kept dragging it out and we it held up another project so we got with the district uh let it find out we didn't want to hurt the fight uh going after the person's bond the company's bond it's going to hurt them

057getting other work we don't want to do that we're still trying to partner with the community and partner with the small contractors but we got at least let them know that this is costing everyone money what we ended up doing is de-scoping the work uh bidding the the rest of the work out to another contractor and you know back charging the contractors so that we save them on the project uh next question myself uh so my question is have you noticed that some of these questions might be similar you know and these are things that are very important to us um but we'll be exactly listening so on number four have you been a part of any questionable behavior and how would you deal with the board met how how would you deal with a

058board member or staff asking you to be involved in questionable activity for example fraud fortunately no um we haven't been part of any questionable behavior um how to deal with it i i look at it as a lot of things when it comes to the company is my my name is on the company uh as i said before it's the second generation my dad started it so it's a legacy um he's one of the most stand-up people that i will ever go and i make sure i follow in that same footsteps if there was anyone within my firm that came close to anything that was deemed questionable uh it would not be tommy um yeah again my my my name is there i'm the g in jgm that means everything to me uh so if

059someone were to come a board member if a staff member uh were to come to one of my employees one of my cell by myself i would then take it to um if it happened to be a board member i would take it to you president uh if it was a staff member i would take to you mr chain um it would not be targeted we will adhere to california state contract public contract code and all of the ramifications they're in and so we'll work with you with writing language in your contracts to ensure that this kind of thing won't happen whether it be from scope definition all the way through completion we just don't do this stuff next question is how would you deal with a delay in a product what would you let

060the district staff know about any delays um do you have any examples of any delays in any of the products and what uh i'll go ahead and take this one um i was about to put my mask on uh first of all transparency and communication is key we i myself as we were mentioning in the you know with questionable behavior i can't lie because i start laughing so i just felt it's i just it honestly is i just be honest with that and that's what we're here to do is to be honest with the district and with you all if something's coming up where a a project is being delayed for whatever reason we have to let you know uh that way you can let the public know this project is being delayed these are

061the reasons why it's being delayed um whatever they might be it's communication that's key to everything especially getting trust with the disc with the public is we got to communicate and be transparent this project is being delayed these are the reasons why uh how we handle the delay is we have language in the in our in our contracts is if a contractor is being delayed whatever it might be uh if it's there you know for whatever their delay they need to submit uh a time impact analysis that shows us how they're going to get back on schedule uh and sometimes like currently now there's a lot of shortages of materials that's something that we have to tell the public tell everybody steel's being delayed because there's a shortage of it the chips you know for

062a lot of uh controls for like say hvac systems are the same chips that go into cars that's right so there's a delay in that and everyone has probably heard of that that you know problem that's come up uh so how we deal with that is well let the public know this is this these are the instead of saying here's the problem we tell everyone here's the solution to what we're gonna do while this is going on we're gonna go ahead and take care of all these other parts first so that you know when a file with when stuff uh material become available we can finish this part off but at least we've got this other 75 completed um the first thing that we will do just by the way i'm kovit 19 certified by

063the state to actually go in and do this and so i've consulted with a few school districts and clients would be churches other public entities to address this very issue the first thing we're going to do is evaluate your current hvac system and the new ones that have been installed plus the old ones to figure out hey we're going to get them cleaned and sanitized and then we're going to come in and seal the duct works and then we'll come in and recommission them in the case of the 2018 units and make sure they're compatible with the cdc guidelined and approved hepa filters because we're going to replace the filters and install hepa filters throughout the district and then we'll come up with a budget and we'll work with your maintenance department to determine what

064filters they want to use of the improvements and we'll make that a part of the district's standard as we go in and start evaluating and developing standards so that's the basic thing and the other thing is is just to go in and recommission it commission assistance to make sure that you're getting the best bang for your buck and you're getting energy efficiency as well so it's not just a pure air situation but we come in and monitor your air changes the amount of air flow that you have and so we've been doing this now for the whole coven 19 year we work with different cleaning companies and cleaning firms to go in and address all the issues with our current clients but also put plans in place and standards in place so that we kind

065of future proof this situation can hear your questions if you can please take off okay well well the uh first thing we look at we need to evaluate the scope of work of those initial projects review the commissioning that those projects went through and at this point most projects go through some form of commissioning before it's turned over to you to occupy so we'll re we'll evaluate that and see where we are in warrants so what safety issues it's really going to be a campus by campus evaluation to determine that but just in our general experience uh 2018 is almost like a lifetime ago and so with the new kona standards and things that are in place the first step is just like the other stuff let's evaluate what systems we have in place how

066safe are they do they meet current cdc standards and codes do they meet current you know city ordinances regarding safety and then we go from there but for the most part you know most of the stuff that we're dealing with is really on the life safety issue and those codes fortunately haven't changed very dramatically so in terms of your exiting and your path of travels and your egresses you should be in pretty good shape from 2018 till now the big thing is going to be just on the hvac side and the system side you know what kind of uh exposure you have with regard to the existing mechanical systems that are in place or that they provide provided so that'll be a hand in glove exercise with your district maintenance staff so that we can

067determine we know what cdc says and what cal osha says are the preferred you know types of systems to input and what those standards are and calculations are but we work with your district directly to determine which manufacturers you prefer what's readily available because that's a big issue and then also what we want to implement so this is again a transparent hand and glove solution that we'll come up with together [Laughter] in the last 40 years we've never had litigation we've never had conflicts uh yeah never uh and nor do i plan to that's a streak i like keeping alive so i'm not sure if testing i just unmuted myself uh no i think should i just keep myself unmuted here daniel because i know you have muted me so i just want to confirm

068the question and just me oh so go ahead and read myself all right okay um no i think they heard me answer okay uh maybe if you want to repeat the question the question was do i preface it with all the other comments [Laughter] have you had any recent litigation or significant conflict within the last 10 years with any of your clients or so please tell us so you heard the response yes thank you can i move on tonight thank you vice president yes please all right um please explain your pricing structure um do you include automatic escalators and you overhead in your proposal please provide an example of items for which you would typically build a district to the benefit of the public so that you are aware or the differences is between the

069between fourths if i do recall i think we just had hourly rates in there for certain positions uh usually within um uh usually within that we will have a just a three percent cola cost of living increase or adjustment uh that happens every year um that's how we normally do our pricing structure uh for billing outside of that say the for except for the say softballs trailers oh yeah uh we don't really build the travel yeah trailer travel um computers copiers oh i'm sorry that you're my friend yeah outside of uh you know trailers you know copiers uh uh laptops computers you know uh basically overhead um and so that's that's the only additional if if that i think those are the nine questions that we have uh for you at this time thank you

070very much and if you can patiently wait in the other room and we will call you at the end of the meeting uh with the decision okay thank you so much for your time thank you okay thank you so much and publicly we can be patient as we um as his firm exits and we bring in the next i think um and the next firm just to remind the public we have kitchell um coming in thank you would you like me to ask them thank you can i ask a couple of questions uh president can you hear me hello can anyone hear me i guess not i can hear you chosen okay well i wanted to ask right and if we're not speaking we will mute ourselves uh the next firm coming up will be

071kitchell um and we will be setting up so thank you uh public for your patience um i don't think she can hear you or me i don't know why yeah i wonder why she can't hear us she on the english channel i am i am too i think she is no because well somebody would hear us i'll just text her go ahead trustee pam you can do it however you want i believe christopher harano is doing a tab on his computer um i'm writing them on our paper um as long as you have your scores by the end of this process um you submit them all yes thank you trusted family okay we have our next firm here firm kitchel welcome and we will open up with the presentation and then go into the questions

072each board member submitted one or two questions so we will just ask them as we submit them after the presentation thank you welcome just so the public knows um i let daniel our technology person here supporting us to let me know give me a thumbs up when we're ready to go with the presentation oh when i speak thank you thank you very much uh we are the kitchen team we're very uh happy to be here and good afternoon to uh all board members superintendent mr chang and uh we have a brief presentation that complies with the request that you sent us and uh we'll be ourselves talking as we go and uh first of all uh i'll introduce myself our team will do the same and i'll talk a little bit about our uh rest

073of the presentation i am arturo i am the regional executive for kitchell in the bay area and i am responsible to provide all the resources that are needed for our team to provide the service and fulfill this contract that we are lucky enough to be selected i have 30 years of experience in this industry i used to be on your side of the table i used to be an employee at the director of facilities in real estate both for san francisco unified and berkeley unified so i have a full understanding of both inside and outside the district and what it takes to accomplish a test like this hi i'm patricia nguyen i'll be your program director and your main point of contact throughout the program i've been with kitchell for over 19 years working on

074various k-12 programs throughout the south bay including two bond programs for san jose unified school district and union school district i am a parent so i have two school-age children in the k-12 program also and i am bilingual i speak vietnamese and english so i look forward to working with you guys good evening everybody my name is jason villanueva and i'm the project controls director for kitchell i have over 12 years of experience with reporting and business intelligence and analytics and so what i do is i support each of the programs that we run uh to really provide accountability and transparency to the services that we provide for our clients and i look forward to working with the district thank you thank you uh in addition to the folks that are here today uh we

075have other people that uh we have in our team they couldn't be here because of the constraints and the the number of people were allowed to bring and uh but they both are bilingual by culture they live in the area they have work in education in the area myself i also bilingual by culture and spanish and uh we're happy to provide our services we have a history in the bay area for over 30 years we set up originally around cupertino that was our first education client kitchel has been around for over 70 years and here in the bay area over 30 years we started with cupertino many years ago and have done a number of districts around here overall throughout california we provided services for over 60 school districts up and down the state and

076we have put in place over 14 billion dollars worth of school construction uh in terms of uh the work that we have supported and managed for other districts um we have experience with a number of local districts around here and this experience has enabled us to see and learn and provide and build just about every type of building in any school setting and therefore we bring that experience to bear be that classrooms laboratories gymnasium etc some of us have done just about every building type and we will happy to bring that experience to you uh ron here we've done uh uh milpitas yes our presentation seems to be stuck oh let's have a quick pause here so our presentation can be caught up for the public thank you for your patience we'll pause the timer

077all right i think we're good now back on so just to conclude my remarks and sorry about that um uh we've worked with a number of districts right now we're helping milpitas we're helping redwood city schools uh we used to work up until recently and hopefully more later over at east side you're the defeating high school district a number of great facilities there and again the our experience comes with us to support this particular district and we're very honored to serve you patricia so you know you've already started some work on the program planning we want to take meet with you and pick up those pieces and really understand what's already been done so we can be efficient and not repeat work that you've already completed but we want to take our experience so we

078can realign the budgets and help you prioritize projects based on the current needs and really these are components to put together your program implementation plan that's the roadmap for how you're going to spend your bond which how where you're going to allocate your dollars and what schedule you're going to do the projects on and this is how we transparently show the community what we're going to do so due to time constraints we're just going to focus on three key issues that we're going to talk about updating costs in the previous facility conditions assessment and helping you prioritize projects and then jason's going to talk a little later about the dashboard system and how it can relay information in a transparent manner and throughout the process we'll be collaborating with you and communicating with you to

079ensure an essential program so we really want to work on updating the costs of your facilities conditions assessment that you've already done we understand with kovid there has been major impacts to costs in the area due to labor shortages because there's multiple projects going on and then as well as supply chain on other programs we've had to pre-purchase electrical equipment to meet the timelines we need because not just with covid's supply chain but also the houston freeze affected delivery affected all the manufacturers and we are in constant communication with those suppliers so they let us know ahead of time what's going on and we can work with them and say okay you know let's try to make up the schedule and let's pre-purchase certain things to try to meet the schedule and still meet our

080deadline and then in prioritizing projects we really want to address look at first what are the critical needs of the campus to address your safety and code issues you know as a parent i want to make sure my child's going to safe school just like everyone's child goes to a safe school and as you're realigning certain campuses in your district we want to make sure that the programmatic needs on each campus are addressed so that we can equitably manage every campus and make sure the faculty and the students have everything they need to be successful with tobit impact showed us how to be flexible over these last few months we were able to on other programs move projects ahead quickly because campuses weren't occupied so projects that we would normally do like a solar project

081that would have to shut down a whole parking lot we were able to do much quickly much more quickly because there was nobody parking on campus so we we are a team that is agile and can adapt to changing markets so one of the other service offerings that we provide in terms of us managing a program and the projects is really the ability to be transparent and to hold ourselves accountable for the services that we provide um we actually create custom dashboards and what you'll see on the screen is a sample of some of these dashboards that we're able to create and we use these as a communication tool both internally and also for the general public so that they are aware of what's going on how the dollars are being spent so there's a

082lot more confidence that you know we've set a plan and we can track how that plan is going so a couple more examples here of being able to identify early risk right if we can keep all that information in one place where everybody can go to to work out the same information we can identify that risk and and mitigate it before the risk becomes an actual uh reality last example here is really being able to display financial so we can connect to any system and we use microsoft power bi because it's non-proprietary and it doesn't lock you into something that that you have to pay for over time especially if you don't want to use it anymore and so again this is another service offering to help us with the theme of accountability and transparency

083thank you jason um uh the big part of this effort i mean is the technical component but the communication strategy it is really important to be able to communicate with a community that has supported you and that we can do that we do that every day multilingually and understand what needs to happen and we communicate what has happened when it's gonna next things are gonna happen so that there are no surprises both you and the community are ever aware of every single element that will be happening and how much is costing and so forth uh just in closing i just want to say a couple of things uh we are a local leader in k12 program management we've been here for over 30 years providing this kind of service we're proud of it and we

084bring a lot of experience to support you secondly we have a proven approach we bring a skeleton of best practices so that we can adapt to your district and there is no learning curve we've done this before we do it well and we can do it again adapt it to you so you can have a successful program and lastly we're a local diverse group of professionals and we'll be very proud to serve you thank you very much [Music] thank you um and at this time we'll go ahead and start with the questions um we'll have the uh first trustee uh who's joining us virtually and we'll be asking the first question yeah can you hear me uh trustee christine can you hear me we cannot hear you i'm not sure if it's something in here

085one second i think you did there it is perfect oh you can hear me now yes all right awesome okay thank you for the presentation uh my i have one question submitted but it's kind of um several questions in one so i'll go ahead and go with this question do you have experience developing and implementing a district-wide solar energy program if no what is your familiarity with financing options available to districts and what would your approach and strategy be in developing a solar energy program in alabama if yes please describe your experience and how it would be beneficial to the development of a solar energy program in alabama yeah the answer is yes i do have experience working on a district-wide solar energy program oh i'm sorry yes so most recently um in sara togo

086we are putting solar panels on three additional parking lots and it's able to take the campus 90 off the grid um that delivery method is a design build project so we worked with um sun power who provides the panels and then they also provide the construction for it and we provide the coordination for the site and for the campus to do that i've also done it in san jose where we worked with chevron and they provided some of the financing for that solar program by selling back some of the solar energy that was created so it's really a district decision do you want to create solar energy to sell back to the grid or do you want to keep it and use it for yourself because um what we did in saratoga was we designed

087storage so that we stored the power and the campus could use it so if there was ever a power outage they had a generate enough power saved to use for their own campus thank you and that's it before we go into the next okay um we'll go ahead and move on to trustyfam at this time and so we do have cost control measures that we've used we work with work closely with the district to align with whatever program you prefer um but to make sure so i regularly when we're in the cm phase work with the contractors um to review costs every month so that there's no surprises and i forecast any changes that i foresee being out in the field that would result in changes and additional costs for the district um and also

088part of the part of the technology that we bring especially with different contractors that come on that may have different accounting systems uh whether it's with the district or ourselves we can combine all that information into one place so that we can appropriately track it what we want to do is we want to make it easier for the contractors to be able to you know use whatever system they're comfortable with to track their budgets but we're also able to take that same information so that we're comparing apples to apples with everybody else and being able to provide that information so it's more accessible to everybody it's in real time and there's no barriers it allows people to really be able to see engage how are we trending in terms of spent right if i if

089i'm able to see in real time the direction i'm heading we can go ahead and make uh changes to that so in terms of things like with labor compliance and safety laws and stuff we can track all that information uh regardless of whatever system people use now by default we use procore internally and that's another offering that we extend to our clients should they not have something that they already use does that answer your question yeah trust your family or you're able to just go into your next question and if you can meet yourself there could you name a time when your firm has had a conflict with a contractor and elaborate on how your firm resolved that conflict to ensure the timely progress of the bond finance project um i think every project has

090conflict with contractors but how i resolve them is i i work and anticipate the challenges that they're gonna have so sometimes it could be that their subcontractors are not performing if that first first we identify the problem and then i really with our background as general contractors also help them solve that issue so that it does doesn't delay the project if there's times that a subcontractor is not performing we point it out to them and help them support getting that subcontractor back on track so that they can perform and do the work and get the project done in time because there are times when on low bid projects your contractor may not be sophisticated enough to realize that there's an issue but we will identify the issue because our background is builders as well as

091designers and construction managers we can identify that [Music] we answer the question you have to be answering all right the next two questions are from me um the next question is is have you been a part of any questionable behavior how would you deal with the board member or staff asking you to be involved with questionable activities such as fraud first of all i have not been part of but i've had an experience with that and it was not a k-12 it was at a community college level it it was not a fraud per se but it was an inference from a board member that he would like to see a process that uh favor a a certain professional obviously we have an ethics code that we follow ourselves and we have our own moral

092compass and uh for me and and i had a very good client then that the vice chancellor of facilities uh was our direct uh boss per se so we always have one contact that we're the it's a go-to person so i brought the situation to that particular uh vice chancellor and he addressed it with the chancellor at the time and they uh worked it out with the board member and welcome to the process of public procurement and at the end of the day nothing happened but uh it is something that we're very aware and that we're very proactive to avoid and to communicate the situation to our clients so that the proper action can be taken does that address your question yeah the next question is how would you deal with the delay in the

093project here okay the next question how would you delay how would you deal with a delay in the project when would you let you know that the staff know about any delays and have you had an example of any delays in the past um in projects you have been a part of and what or how did you deal with them um so yes there you know there are sometimes unforeseen conditions that causes delays and you know i'm in on projects i'm in regular communication with the the owner and the client so that they're always aware of what's going on so that they can become part of the solution as well i don't want surprises to arise at the last minute so an example of this is a middle school i worked on um when we

094opened the ceiling there was some structural issues that we were not aware of so the state required us to redesign a portion of that structure well redesigning it and then getting a new approval on that delayed the project several months but we you know the owner was involved in these design meetings the whole time so they could see the impact of this change in the scope and then they were able to talk to the principal um we had already moved the classroom into interim housing so they talked to the principal and let the teacher know right away so she could plan the rest of her curriculum knowing that she would stay in that portable until the work was done um so i think the sooner you let somebody know the better because that nobody likes

095a surprise at the last minute they want to be able to plan and make the best uh adapt adapt to what's um coming up and if i can add one quick thing typically these situations arise for nobody intentionally gets delayed there's always a cost and what we try to do is focus on the cost the root cause of the delay so that we with the contractor the arc that industry can resolve and recuperate it can be manpower it can be a supply chain or it can be material that is not available typically those are the things so we are there as a practice thank you thank you very much next questions will be uh presented by trustee linda thomas okay indoor air quality is at the center of concerns about how schools can safely open

096during a pandemic what would you do to solve the air quality issues have you looked at the scope of work on the emg report in 2000 issues the issues that need addressing um so yes we we have on other school districts address the air quality issue we actually our engineering and architecture group did a whole site survey for san francisco unified and gave them a report to identify what they needed to do for their hva system to upgrade it to meet the requirements so they could bring students back to campus and that was except you know the district was very grateful for that report because we were able to do it really quickly we're they're already in-house we didn't have to go and procure another engineer they they could do that all in-house because we

097have licensed engineers and architects in-house which is i think what sets us apart from other construction management companies um the we uh have reviewed uh lightly the report and have not done a it's their analysis to figure i mean there's only we have a summary of it they have a full report so if we were given the opportunity to look at that in detail we would be more than happy to finalize it and provide some potential solutions to address that for sure okay besides all the five projects that a previous board approved in 2014 and bond money was available and was supposed to be spent to finish those board approved projects in your expert opinion what are the safety issues that need to be addressed first or immediately i'll i'll start the projects safety is

098first and foremost on every project on every school district and essentially us and not not only anything new you the district are trusted by the parents in the community to safely provide the education for the kids and uh so it is really important to prioritize especially student safety at the outset of any program if you have a limited amount of funds you have to go through a process and figure out what makes sense in terms of how do we prioritize and keep safety and compliance in the top of your list it is going to be very important that those items are addressed as soon as possible and especially if they can grow to become more compounded problems that god forbid we have an accident or something and then the district is in a very difficult

099situation so it's something that we would come look at and analyze the conditions of every situation and figure okay what can we do here to mitigate their safety and the risk of the district do you have any no that's the data to browse your question thank you and now last but not least we have vice president andres ditto presenting the next question all right the question has been asked and however some of the material is somewhat dated and so i think it's important to provide uh all those who brought forward proposals to to respond to this question that's why i'm asking you so have you had any litigation or significant conflict within the last 10 years with any of your clients and so please celebrate yes uh we addressed that in the proposal i don't

100have it in front of me but since that has happened we have not had any new situations that uh are a legal challenge where we have done something or someone else did something and we got uh a name in the complaint so what we've had we addressed it in the proposal and uh i don't have it in front of me but we i believe we address there were a couple of situations there and we provide an explanation and provide the uh of the situation and also explain the outcome and i believe we actually were it was well established and we are okay thank you the next question is please explain your pricing structure do you include automatic escalators and any overhead in your proposals please provide example of items for which you would typically build

101a district this is you obviously have it in writing but some benefit for the community so they can understand how you guys intend attended bill i will uh address that and if there's anything like this please uh jump in uh for us what uh a is a typical cm service agreement and what we do we sit down with you at the outset and map out what it's going to take to accomplish the scope that you request from us we have provided rates for individuals for each of the positions and what we do to the best of our ability without knowing how exactly the future looks but we that's why we sit down with you and we figure out the best uh uh or the optimal uh schedule to deliver the projects that you assigned to

102us and we basically look at duration times our rates that equals a certain amount and depending upon which staff you uh the project mandates and what we also have is over time if a pro project has a duration of three years we include and i believe we include it there and the footnotes i believe it's about three percent increase annually i can't remember if it was theirs in january or in july but it's a cause that you know we give our employees we treat them fairly they get raises cost of living increases et cetera so it's something that is part of and we're transparent we show you what it is and it's written there uh we have options when we get to the point where we define the the scope of work in the duration

103where we can depending upon what is the appetite of the board we can convert it to a lump sum uh price including based on the duration including those escalations on an annual basis and that becomes the price for the program management effort and or construction management for certain projects as we see we do it together thank you okay and that concludes the question portion of our interview um if you can uh please wait in the room uh next door and we will call all the firms at the end with the um decision at that time thank you thank you in public if you can just be patient we are going to be calling our next firm up which is get my little notes here we have coming coming up next uh yeah so let's go

104ahead and take a four minute bio break as the next firm sets up uh looks like we have quorum presentation is ready to start i'm sure linda's on our way back [Music] let's give it a couple of seconds [Music] otherwise let me i have uh vice president quintero here i have mr pham and myself and i see trustee veterano um linda come back we'll go ahead and uh since we do have quorum we'll go ahead and start on on the presentation uh do you have um i think she went with lisa to check on something and you can let let me see [Music] seconds here um so we can restart the clock as soon as we start can we uh pause that or rewind if possible on the presentation up on our screen is that

105possible otherwise we'll composite maybe i can pause it and maybe it's on me no there it is it's oh it's so good okay well let's go ahead and start um i see uh the 130 on there as soon as we start i'll just make sure that we time it at 10 minutes so welcome um we'll go going to start with the presentation portion uh welcome coming thank you very much we're really pleased to be here today to make our presentation um to the elm rock union school district um the good thing about coming just a quick overview we're a nationwide international company but we have a san jose office each office is a stand-alone but we really collaborate within the other offices so we bring a lot of integrated services and a lot of expertise

106to all of these uh uh to all your projects which one that one okay now okay my name is john olson i'm the project executive um i will oversee the team i'll oversee bringing the services the right services at the right time to the district um i'm there to provide backup support when big issues start to happen complicated ones i've been in the business 42 years been doing k-12 uh construction management for the last 24 years so i've got a lot of experience can bring a lot of that to to the table importantly is i grew up on the east side san jose i was an uh alum rock um student for nine years of my life starting in kindergarten and i actually graduated all the way to the eighth grade so um it's very

107near and dear to me you have i like the community i have friends here i have family here um my friends have children that have gone through the district so it is very very important to me to be really excellent everything we do for you with that i'll good evening my name is michael gordomani i'm the project manager for various projects on the bond program i'm actually born and raised in the bay area as well so again working on projects in the local community is something that's extremely important to me and that'll go over to frank hi my name is frank dickinson i'm a director for coming i'm a director of project management um i would be working to help with this managing the staffing of the various of whatever we needed in the way

108of project management um i've been a california general contractor for over 40 years and we're coming now for uh five and uh one of the relevant projects that we just completed that i managed to team on was pajaro valley school district in watsonville we did three years of their bond which also included the building of a new sports stadium so with that uh just real quickly we'll go over you know who we are we talked about that the project team uh then we're gonna get into our program approach and um thank you so here's the here's the uh project team frank's gonna be your day-to-day central contact um i'll be the project executive i'll be working with frank i'll be working with the district i'll be working with the user groups working with the community

109i'm here to support the team to make sure the right resources are brought to bear when you need it in a cost-effective and efficient manner um we chose this team with uh and we're only showing five or so people here but we chose this team because of their k-12 experience and their local experience as well as their different expertise and we're going to talk about the different expertise as we go forward okay so as you kick it off we'll have a 30 60 90 day plan yeah it's very important that as we get started on the project that we hit the ground running um one of the first things that we're going to we would want to be doing is to meet with all the different stakeholders and including construction teams uh maintenance teams um

110even even your i your technical teams we found that if in the beginning you meet with all them and try to get the info get the ideas of what they really need it really makes the thing start out correctly with that information we can better prioritize uh what projects go when so that we can put to start putting together a master schedule also early we would want to bring our cost team in uh i'm assuming that the district has their own cost estimates from for the various projects um and it's the way that the construction is right now a lot of the estimates are are really they change basically daily so it would be good for our costume to come in to see where our costs are compared to now um and then and then

111to look at that uh as well for any escalation in the future um we would also in the beginning uh try to figure out best delivery methods for the various projects um and then the last thing would be to help you uh engage and um design teams thanks frank as frank mentioned we were gonna hit the ground running i want to talk about cummings way how we approach a program or master program approach and how we set one up really it comes down to setting up the proper documents and making sure that there's transparency and communication through the entire process from the very beginning to the last project closing what that what that entails is financial tracking our financial tracking systems making sure that the expenditures are for bond authorized projects and running through to

112the project management portion standing up the project management and projects getting project schedules in order project budgets in order as well as the weekly and monthly reporting process so we have transparency and communication on the entire process visibility on project priorities visibility on project budgets project spending and project timelines and that takes us into constructions you know we set up the contract administration process make sure the public bidding process goes smooth and projects hit the ground running as well and we are involved in the inspection process making sure and making sure that construction goes smoothly and we go to the end on close-up um also with that is funding so funding obviously is extremely important so our background you know working with many school districts and k to 12 different schools we understand the office

113of public school construction different grant opportunities they have for possible funding as well as prop 39 best practices and compliance understanding bond compliance means uh fiscal accountability means fund tracking and reporting making sure the community has eyes and this is a transparent process so we understand what's going on projects and that comes down to record retention having a paper trail i'll quickly just touch on budget and cost analysis and we have a strategic approach that we implement on our projects to make sure again that we can timely implement and deliver cost estimates that are audit proof and provide the financial stability and information that you need when reviewing so hannah glover with the continuing estimating and budget reconciliation uh efforts that we're going to do um we have great value engineering systems we started the

114concept we look at materials labor uh equipment availability right now there's there's shortages um in a lot of material and equipment we look at that and it may say yeah we want to switch the material or the equipment in order because there's less of a time lag and we'll be able to hit the schedule better we have a great constructability team it's made up of all sorts of different experts uh designers uh civil structural electrical mechanical waterproofing we get into all the nuances we utilize the uh army corps of engineering uh a system and on a recent high school project um ground up we have we found over eleven thousand dollar eleven thousand conflicts errors emissions and we're getting those cleaned up before it goes out the bid what does that do it saves rfis

115requests for information it says change orders it makes for a more efficient schedule you get the projects done on time and the whole process works off smoother these guys save themselves save the district's money exponentially it is really the best thing going so yeah so scheduling um as mentioned scheduling is going to be a very important aspect once we've talked with all the different stakeholders uh we'll work together with our um coming schedule team to put a master's schedule together we'll look at the particulars um of some of the long-term more maintenance type things because they take different different types of scheduling uh get ready to procure the designers and we'll look at we'll see what you guys have that might be shovel ready that we can really get started as soon as possible to

116kind of keep it going um and then the main thing is going to be we will be doing keeping up a master schedule monthly and and publishing it to everybody i don't say i am that's my picture alex shepard uh anyway we're i'm really dedicated i'd be i'd be honored and humble to give back to the community to shape my life in my early years thank you thank you so much at this time we're going to go ahead and begin the question and answer portion of the interview we're gonna go ahead and um just go down the list and you have the questions in front of you and we'll just ask them as they are in order there and we're gonna go ahead and start with trustee ernesto vegeta who is connecting with us virtually

117yes thank you just a quick check can you hear me can you hear me yes yes we can hear you i wanted to make sure all right um thank you for the presentation and my we were able to submit several questions mine is only one but there's kind of a few questions embedded in there so i will read that question now do you have experience developing and implementing a district-wide solar energy program if no what is your familiarity with the financing options available to districts and what would your approach and strategy be in developing a solar energy program in alabama if yes please describe your experience and how it would be beneficial to the development of a solar energy program in alabama so i'll answer the first question coming i talked about where integrated services

118we've got a team that works throughout california that does nothing but energy efficiency sustainability that includes um life cycle cost analysis but includes all sorts of solar they've done solar on on schools on parking structures on public uh places they're experts uh they give lectures they give presentations so our team understands the financing our team understands the nuances i mean they'll be able to come in and help right-size the the uh solar systems um they're very good at what they do did that answer the question yes i think okay thank you for your response thank you uh we can't hear you now i said thank you for your response yeah they just just just add they'll they will develop a district-wide program for you um you know want they look at the long-term thank you

119next question will be uh by trustee pham we'll ask the next two questions okay will you give the board a summary of the cost control and accountability procedures you use with contractors and subcontractors to ensure that a project stays within its allocated budget and timeline to the extent possible while ensuring compliance with all labor and workplace safety laws yes thank you so i think to start um really what it comes down to number one is understanding the scope and then building a relationship with the contractor and then as we talked about how we have our standard best practices our cost control process we have regular scheduled checking meetings with the contractors there are certain time frames that if something does come up they're required to notify us so we have a visual on everything that's

120going with on the project with scope this also keeps them accountability contractual wise as well as we are we understand what buckets are used for other allowances or contingency and how to authorize those um those scopes as well as they should understand there there's no reason for ever to be authorized on scope or building scope that's not already approved to go forward that's something that making sure you have visibility with that as well as understanding the project documents and being involved with the design team um and managing the project's schedule as well making sure that you know in your weekly oacs you're doing a three week look ahead you're managing day-to-day process what's happening on site and understanding that they're not doing any unauthorized work and then at the same time managing the cost control

121change order process with the district going through these are potential risk items and this is how we're going to mitigate it and this is how we track it just to add to that our our philosophy during design is to make sure the architect's designing to the budget so 30 60 90 we're doing uh budgets validating what the architect's telling you and making those decisions to get it back under under control backing budget during the early parts of the design not waiting till the end and just to close that out and with the you know prevailing wage uh making sure and meeting workplace safety um understanding that being in the process in our kickoff meeting going through uh how the project should be set up as well as the regulatory requirements that they have to meet

122nice time could you name a time when your firm has had a conflict with the contractor and elaborate on how your firm resolved that conflict to ensure the timely progress of the bond finance project yes we had um a contractor actually in high school district where uh they had a tendency to not do their paperwork to um constantly have delays um look try to look at everything that they couldn't do as an excuse rather than trying to figure out things that they would need to do if there were any concerns and they were at one point we had a schedule that was uh three months out of black and there was a large number of change orders that were being asked for because of their concerns um a number of different things we did we

123first started started trying doing things through channels the way in the project meetings and uh with letters and with emails and that sort of thing when that didn't work um i actually would take a side a couple of times the owner of the company and tell him where his failings were and sometimes i would get a little bit better uh work from these people and sometimes not uh finally we resorted to uh sending legal letters stating you know the schedule was off you know it gave them all the backup as to why they should where they should be and why we were they weren't why it was important that they get back onto their schedule um as well as making sure that any any added costs that they were thinking that they were owed that

124they had to do that through contractual uh change orders and when at the end of the project they came to us with a like 150 000 worth of change orders that nothing had been said the paperwork had not been done directly for contract i just want to add that a lot of the districts that i work for i get brought in when a project goes bad we're not part of it but all of a sudden they say we're under water struggling we brought a high school that was way behind schedule everybody was fighting brought into project manager and ultimately got the school open on time okay uh next we have questions um i'm sorry my questions uh so the first question that i have is have you been a part of any questionable behavior how

125would you deal with it and how would you go with a board member or staff asking you to be involved in any questionable behavior or activities such as fraud we we just avoid it that that's a red line that we will never cross as a company um you say question behavior between us and a contractor or board member or someone something like that any question or behavior yeah whether it's any of that no that's not tolerated that's not tolerated the public you know k-12 is important in the community k-12 has got a great responsibility i'm sure this group has cleaned up a big mess beforehand that i'm aware of and i think you've done a great job to get to get your audits being audited passing them i think that you'd be commended how do

126you do that well you were straight up you were transparent you were communicated set goals and objectives and if any behavior if we become aware of it i'll probably go to you first i just you know to somebody and say i just got approached by so-and-so that ain't right and by being transparent by being open i have never seen anybody approach us in my in my career and that's over 42 years because i've always gone to companies that were just honest period um so yeah if someone came up to me and wanted to do some shenanigans no because when i added that or just from again it's from the the the culture of the company right that that's how we manage individual projects as well so just in terms of subcontractors and contractors they understand

127that um we do it right we do a transparency with transparency and it's important to us the community is important to us that we do things properly with integrity and i think people around us work with us realize that very soon so we don't ask thank you uh next question how would you deal with that delay in a project when would you let the district staff know about any delays do you have any examples of any delays in any of the projects you have been a part of and how did you deal with that sure um yeah i can start actually well to start it with transparency so these things aren't coming up as surprises right we're having our weekly schedule check-in meetings as well as our meetings with the district as well so they're

128they're involved in the entire process now we would let the district staff know immediately and i have a good example actually recently on one of our projects we had a material delay because of uh supply chain and covid and this was something that we had some specific material that needed to be here so we as working with partners with our contractors right in our meetings we're looking at how can we resequence the schedule how can we mitigate this how can we uh manage around this so we can absorb this while still holding an end date so understand a lot of these buildings this one specifically had an accreditation deadline that if we didn't finish in time we weren't going to have accreditation for this program so it's extremely critical that we found a way to

129get it completed and how we did that was using our resources using our again our partnerships with our contractors and with the district as well in meetings how can we get around this how can we sequence we ended up doing was resequencing how we built the vertical on part of the building so we can come back and do the other portion later so really it comes down to if it's open discussion we have experts working with us we'll figure out how to get it done because we know what's the most important as delivering a project just to add to that um we don't just send paper to the contract you're like that doesn't do any good so on that one project i told you there was real big trouble there was a war between the

130contractor the architect and the district we came in there and we started working with the contractor and we gave them options i'm not just saying give me a recovery status we gave them options we've said you know this one sub is struggling get somebody to help them um we brought a project manager in that work for the project to talk to everybody they got an answer squared so that's proactive thank you next question from trustee linda chavez uh indoor air quality is at the center of concerns about how schools can safely open during a pandemic what would you do to solve the air quality issues in element the good thing again because we're integrated services we've got estimators uh and mechanical electrical uh especially mechanical uh that will come in take a look at a

131system have ideas work with a designer and it also is hand and glove with our sustainability and energy group they do the same thing it's all about building health so we can attack it from two different ways early on you can say if you do this give you you know if you put in uh you know this sort of filter or if you start putting in uh separating rooms whatever it is we'll give you options early on with cost and schedule and impacts how's that going to affect the students how's this going to affect the teaching so we've done it we're doing it throughout california right now especially southern california so i've got a really strong team pick up the phone bring them to bear we'll have solutions for you very quickly yeah and one

132of the things that we with all the different experts of various things that we have there's there's a lot of people that can think outside the box and they'll look at all different options that there are um one example of that was there was a school where they had painted their windows shut you know and that used to be a thing that i used to see a lot of and and so when this started you know one of the things is outdoor air so what one of our people suggested is why don't we fix the windows put a screen on them and then keep them open whenever it can be and something as simple and you know inexpensive as that can really make a difference okay thank you besides all the of the five projects

133that a previous board approved in 2014 and bond money was available and supposed to be spent to finish those board approved projects in your expert opinion what are the safety issues that need to be addressed first or immediately here in elm rock so to clarify your question these projects haven't been finished they're still ongoing and they're they're occupied students um so first and foremost get out to the site meet with the principal meet with the people on site figure out egress make sure that the work and the workers are separated i've been doing this for 25 years with schools and occupied campuses making sure that the barriers are safe making sure that signage is clear making sure that that the principal's aware of okay this is what we're gonna do we we put out weekly

134updates this is what we did this week this is what we're gonna do here the impacts so that they can distribute to the school and to everybody here and understand what what are the challenges and what are the mitigation items we're going to take care of and also understand testing understand the quiet times the school needs to have and work the contractors to the off hours whenever possible anything else no say safety is a priority i'll just wrap it up with that thank you and last questions from vice president all right uh so the question is gonna be asked is one that was already you responded to in a packet what the packets are somewhat dated so i think it's important for us to provide opportunities to all those that are here presenting to respond

135to this have you had any risk litigation or significant conflict within the last 10 years with any of your clients so please tell us so um i will tell you this let me start with this in california we don't have any real disputes there have been a few uh across the country because we are a national company and we have acquired a few businesses that have had lawsuits already pending everything that we have gotten involved in litigation has always been resolved but i will tell you this that um the california team specifically the west coast team uh yeah and i mean for iraqis this way um no litigation we avoid it we resolve it we we're proactive we communicate we're transparent you know it's resolve the problems it's kind of a lean construction technique which

136is resolve the problems called last planner at the earliest and and best opportunity to resolve a situation so if it's a all of a sudden we find a conflict i've seen it where it's a great map four years ago but where the structural engineer is talking to the iron worker because there's a conflict between the anchor bolts and and the structural steel well they both work together and washed it for an hour she'd go can you do this he goes no i can't do that maybe i can do this she no can you do that and they worked out a problem for a hundred fifty thousand square foot mat poor it was magic so we really believe in taking care of the problem early on if a dispute is starting to come together bring the

137right people in the room and mediate it at the lowest possible level at the soonest time second question is once again uh this has been laid out from the documents that you've provided however the public should know and should get a snapshot of what your strategy is and how you you approach feeds please explain your pricing structure do you include automatic escalators and any overhead in your proposals please provide an example of items for which you would typically build a district so the way we bill is we developed a team we have an agreed to hourly rate and we bill for actual hours worked so these projects are going to do this one day it'll be one one two people might be seven back down so in real time you get to see at the

138end of every month who was working on a project in the description what they were doing and be able to know what we're charging so in our package i said what's called our ppme it showed my projected over three years uh all the work that was going to be done and who was going to perform the different aspects of the work once we come on board with you what we would do is take a look at that and then refine it and come to an agreement okay here's a gmp so with that you know what your exposure is we work to be as efficient as possible um we have a three percent a year that's standard in the industry uh escalation to our fee rate um so you know about it in advance you know

139when it's coming there's no surprises we you know we have to be your advocate we have to be your partner you you know we can't give you surprises we can't very transparent if we have expenses we'll let you know we'll get them approved in advance yeah if we see some big changes that we didn't expect we'll talk to you first we're not going to throw out a change order we're going to talk to you first and say hey you know this is really you know turned out to be what much different than what we play so at any given time we really hold to our budgets you always know what you're paying for and you always you know can challenge us thank you thank you very much now this concludes the question uh portion of

140our interview if you can uh patiently wait in the room next door and we will bring you in at the end when we make our decision okay thank you very much appreciate all of you thank you very much we'll have a three minute break in between uh the setup take down here take down the setup of the next firm see you back in three minutes and in that process just uh named the final firm we have tri group coming up there is something just opportunities and less reasons for see we're here and they're not okay so it's 8 13 um we are still waiting for the firms to set up so thank you public for your patience um not sure what's happening just waiting patiently so we just found out the reason it's taking a

141little longer is because they're in the computer lab so thank you public for your patience hopefully there's a root conditioner welcome you are our final firm yeah yes please it took us a little longer to bring you in since you were a little further thank you danielle and just give us a thumbs up when you're ready to book it we're good all right um so welcome uh this is tri group and we'll go ahead and start with your presentation portion and then after that we'll go into the questions and answer portion welcome you can join us at the podium and speak from the podium um for your presentation good evening adam a board president members of the board of trustees dr bauer mr chang good evening first of all i'd like to introduce my name

142myself my name is june roja from tri group and with me is mr brian rasmussen the vice president of the right group and dr peter parente also another vice president of tri group i'd like to thank all of you for inviting us to this interview it really is a pleasure for us to be here so with that we'll go ahead is it correct the board room is unneeded and the firm is moving is that correct all right thank you a couple seconds okay thank you this is a i'd like to go over about the right group our organization our project approach and team uh what's different about our firm and then we'll be happy to answer any questions from the board so tri grip has been uh in operation since 1987 and continuously for the

143last 34 years we're a firm with very diverse experience and we represent not only individuals with facilities experienced but we have previous administrators we have four former superintendents assistant superintendents we have four licensed architects in our firm engineers general contractors communication experts so we really have the depth that allows us to be able to provide service to our clients we're a medium-sized firm 48 personnel with offices in california in philippines and canada and we've managed over three billion dollars of direct uh program management construction management for uh school districts with their bond programs so with the composition of our team not only do we understand your challenges we've been there we can manage difficult conversations on behalf of alumni school district when that is ever necessary for us to do that we will do that

144and we don't shy away from that thank you so we are unique again as i said because of the composition of our firm and that allows us to be able to look at district bond programs not only from the perspective of someone with construction experience but also from an educator's standpoint because we believe at the end of the day a bond program should support student success and should support the curriculum so beyond buildings we build relationships and we only have one client in mind your students so for us our approach has always been it is never our bond program this is your bond program and we are here to help you in any way shape or form that you believe you want to take your bond program to so everyone in this field may know

145construction however our team knows the direct correlation between the built environment and student success and what you see is what we get we really feel our clients with staff that are seasoned so we don't bring in someone that would do on-the-job training we don't do that you know we really believe that the district should get what they pay for and that is with seasoned experience one of the things that really sets us apart is we have a communication and outreach plan we actually have a full-time staff uh that if we're fortunate enough to be selected for alan rocky in your school district we will have a full-time person helping the district communicate with its contingents so with that with the bond programs that we have managed even now currently for a large school district unified

146school district that we're helping with tri group introduced what we call a labor partners meeting and in that meeting we meet with all of your union presidents executives and we tell them what's going on with the bond program on your behalf we have done a lot of school site meetings we work with cboc because we believe that at the end of the day it's important for the public to know what the district is doing with the bond dollars and cboc plays a role in that aspect and so we really work with them again we we don't manage meeting were there as a support to the cboc they are in the independent body established by statutes especially if uh if if you've done a bond program uh you know the prop 39 that requires a cvoc

147we do social media on the district's behalf blog posts twitter facebook linkedin and we do a lot of community outreach and we do a lot of surveys on your behalf at the end of the day a bond program is measured whether or not it is on time and on budget because if it's not on time it impacts students if it's not on budget that means you have less money to spend on other programs that the board would want to accomplish and we also recognize that project schedules need to fit the educational calendar to make sure that students are not impacted by the projects and we will always work to make sure that your interests are protected one of the things that tri group developed for our clients is the art of a bond program and

148art stands for accountability responsibility and transparency we want to make sure that we represent you as the board to your community by making sure that the bond dollars are spent and that it is spent in a way that's accountable to the public that we take our responsibility seriously that we do everything that is written in your bond language that you have approved and that were transparent in that process and we want to make sure that not just from the beginning but each and every time a project starts we will meet with the community we will meet with your principals with your teachers so there are no surprises one of the things that we're very strong in is we tend to over communicate than not communicating or minimal communication our four focus areas deals with budget

149schedule record keeping communication and outreach these are the four pillars uh that we follow every time we manage a bond program again i've talked about budget and schedule but because sometimes some of your projects are supported by state money we want to make sure that your record-keeping is uh really solid and again we want to make sure that we communicate with you with your administration and cboc and the public and the staff so why to your right group first of all we recognize that public programs are a public trust and that trust demands accountability responsibility and transparency we will work with and hold all vendors and consultants to your district accountable because that's what you expect from us if you again if we're fortunate enough to be selected and a principle that we have practiced

150in our firm which we actually have developed is a dollar doctrine principle of a dollar doctrine what that simply means is that album rock school district when you pay someone including us all of your vendors your consultants contractors if you pay them a dollar you should get a dollar in return and perhaps a dollar twenty if we can even get that but the district should never get less than what it pays for and we are very committed to make sure that we do our best to make sure that you're getting that dollar whatever that contract amount may be and sometimes when that happens when we're really holding people accountable it leads to very difficult conversation but we can assure you that our team will always protect your interest i think this slide really represents why

151we're different you can see a lot of acronyms uh initialisms abbreviation right on the blue section are are those acronyms initialisms that pertains to the typical program construction management firm and right on the green are again acronyms initialisms abbreviations that the education side the curriculum side uses what's different and unique about the uri group because of our composition again with not just facilities uh folks but also educators is we understand each and every acronyms and acronym and abbreviation initials that's there for example the very end when you talk about ada in the blue section uh that's stands for if you're from a facilities frame of mind that's americans with disabilities on but when when you get to the green from the curriculum side it's average daily attendance so i think that's the strength that we

152offer uh to your district so what's uniquely different despite all the bells and whistles that you you'll hear from the firms we will put in seasoned professionals in your project and again for us we're not just consultants we want to be a partner with you we want to make a difference for you and the students because quite simply it is our passion thank you thank you and uh now we're moving to the question and answer portion of our interview and you have the questions in front of you on the table um we will then uh turn over to the laptop in front of you uh danielle is going to help us set that up and we will go down the questions as they are presented we'll go ahead and start with trustee ednesto by hidano

153who is joining us virtually and we'll present the first question uh trustee if you can give us a couple seconds to set up the audio go ahead okay quick sound check can you hear me all right good okay so thank you very much for the presentation uh we have the opportunity to submit one second trustee sorry about that president you can answer from where you're sitting yes thank you good okay we had the opportunity to submit several questions my question is kind of several questions in one so i'll just go ahead and read my question and i'd like to answer that so the question is do you have experience developing and implementing a district-wide solar energy program if no what is your familiarity with financing options available to districts and what would your approach and

154strategy be in developing a solar energy program in alam rock if yes please describe your experience and how it would be beneficial to the development of a solar energy program yes theo right group actually has a solid experience uh in developing and implementing a district-wide solar energy program in fact we just finished a 30 million dollar solar installation for hayward unified school district that encompasses 32 sites 32 school sites so what would be how would first of all we believe that it's very beneficial not only because it protects the environment saves the environment but from a financial standpoint it really saves the district's school money for example the project that we have the 30 million dollar project we have done would actually net the district over 60 million dollars for the life of the bond

155program uh and all that stevie's obviously helps the general fund you know the process that we believe districts should do first is to make sure that there is a feasibility study that is conducting an engineering study you look at the district's you know energy expenditures in the last 24 months and then you analyze what would the benefits of installing a solar program and when we talk about solar energy that is not just limited to the rooftop solars or the parking shade solars what we've done uh when working with our clients is we encourage them to look at energy storage battery storage we look at ev electric electric vehicle charging stations because all of that can include can actually result in additional savings for the district so you do the feasibility study if it makes sense

156you do an rfq you you know you vet the potential vendor that will do this and there's a specific government code that will help school districts determine and vet some of those firms so again it's a very quick way to say that yes we've done it we've worked with other school districts other than hayward greenfield for example school district is in the process of implementing that we've worked with them and so so yes we've done it thank you the next portion will be presented by trustee evening family thank you okay yeah i am okay uh when you give the board a summary of the cost control and accountability procedures you use with contractors and subcontractors to ensure that a project stays within its allocated budget and timeline to the extent possible while ensuring compliance with

157all labor and workplace safety laws i'll ask the brian rosenstein to respond thank you so the the reality is a budget is made during the design of a project and not during construction and while managing it during construction is really important it is really important to be managing the architect through the design process and doing cost estimating and checkpoints along the way to make sure that the project is designed to be within budget in the first place once you move to the construction phase there are various controls that we can put in place we track things so during the course of construction simple things like what's called a request for information an rfi issued by a contractor you can tell based on the question whether there's potentially cost associated with it so while you don't

158have a change order yet from the contractor we track those things as potential exposures and costs so that we can see where we're falling towards and against the budget relative to um you know on the big picture so that we know how much money we have left and where we stand and you can also track that relative to time over the course of the project and just have a general feel for whether you're having numerous issues up front and you're heading towards a budget problem and that you may need to implement some other measures in order to correct that the question also talks about timelines uh contractors need to submit schedules we typically make pay applications monthly on projects contingent upon having a construction schedule submitted so that we have checkpoints what their perspective is

159you generally develop just a feel for the project and to know how it's tracking time wise but the bottom line is they don't get paid until they've submitted all the proper paperwork that allows us to monitor the project and make sure that it's tracking on schedules so that you end up with a project on budget and on schedule when it's completed next question uh could you need a time when your firm has had a conflict with a contractor and elaborate on how your firm resolved that conflict to ensure the timely progress of the bond finance project okay i'll use a recent example and i mean i would say off the bat you know we are the district's agent so if there's a conflict we're representing the district and it's a conflict with the district that

160we're trying to help mitigate and manage but we were recently asked to take over a 60 million dollar project that was mid-course was close to a year behind schedule was having significant budget issues and we stepped in and so our first thing was to immediately do an analysis the project what was going on and what was happening and what we learned was it all boiled down to more of a personality issue between the design team and the contractor and a failure to communicate in a proper manner and by stepping in we brought in the principles of those firms and had a meeting to talk about communication and the staff assigned and we were able then to work through that and the project moved forward much more fluidly after that and we were able to successfully

161complete the project for the district at the end of the day though it is the district's money and we need to have that in our best interest so we can't allow a contractor that's looking for expenditures that they're not entitled to and there are mechanisms in most contracts that allow the district to force the contractor to proceed and it can be resolved at a later date that's like a last resort but you know there are legal terms within most construction contracts that allow the district to not allow it to end up stopping a project causing yet further issues with schedule and or budget time is money so that equates to you know an issue for the contractor if the time extends they have more overhead and you need to look at that and mitigate that

162as part of the process thank you the next questions will be presented by trustee linda chavis [Music] oh i'm sorry i wanted to just skip over my questions okay so the next question is have you been a part of any questionable behavior how would you deal with a board member or staff asking you to be involved in any questionable activity for example thank you for the question madame president first of all theo right group has never been a part of any questionable behavior have we been around it yes but we have never been a part of that and how would we deal with it with a board member or staff asking to be involved in pressured questionable activity quite simply we won't and our firm principle is simply this we would much rather lose the

163contract than be a part of any questionable or fraudulent activity why because at the end of the day students feel and parents feel that the school district their schools are the safest places for them and if we don't do our job managing and and being accountable to the public funds because it's going to questionable activities the students are the one that gets hurt and they're the ones that will not see the value of the community supporting the bond measure because it's not directly benefiting them because going to other inappropriate activities so our position on that is very strong in fact uh as a firm to ri group never on our own while we are let me rephrase that we are always available to you to the board members to administration to answer questions at any

164time but it is not our practice to actually go out to individual board members and communicate with you directly behind the scenes we just won't do that but if you have questions we're more than happy to answer that we follow the district approved process we will do everything that we believe is right for your district and for your students so again to the point that we're willing to lose a contract and walk away from a contract if we are ever uh exposed to that and and if we have to take action to surface that with you or board or administration we will do that thank you thank you next question how would you deal with the delay in a project when would you let the district staff know about any delays do you have an

165example of any delays in any of the projects you have been a part of and how did you deal with that so our normal course of action in working with the district is there's typically you know whoever our point of contact is we're having regular meetings with them so instance at the moment working with hayward unified we have a standing weekly meeting at the project level and we have a standing weekly meeting at the program level so if things are suspected that they're going south as far as the schedule and there might be a delay on the project it would be discussed at one of those meetings depending on what it's related to if something is escalating and becoming more urgent then we're working we're reaching out directly at the time we become aware of

166any thing that might be impacting the project that whatever the facilities team or whoever we're interact with needs to be kept apprised of what's happening so we're doing that constantly i mean and as i talked about earlier we get schedules monthly at least from the contractor your general walk of the job site through the course of every week you can get a feel for whether a project is tracking or not they the contractor also weekly has to supply you just a short look ahead over the next couple of weeks you can track whether they're falling off of that course those are all red flags to start to indicate that there might be a problem so we are constantly communicating and if there is anything major happening on the project the district is the first point

167of contact to immediately notify them that anything may be happening as far as recent recent projects as i mentioned that project that we took over construction there were a number of delay issues relative to that the contractor had fallen behind on submitting the schedules um you know we literally ended up holding three months of payments until they got caught up with the schedule procedure it's important that that data is provided otherwise you can lose control and not know where you stand it is important to constantly make sure that the required documents are there to make the contractor accountable for what they're doing thank you and now custody okay indoor air quality is at the center of concerns about how schools can safely open during a pandemic what would you do to solve the air quality

168issues uh in allen rock thank you for your question even long before the pandemic we knew that indoor air quality mattered when it came to student uh success and uh teacher success um as a long time teacher myself and school principal i could see that in classrooms when um indoor air was getting stale or when doors and windows were kept closed and the air conditioning was just recirculating 100 percent of that air so when co2 levels go up students get sleepy um especially after lunch i will say now we've also seen indoor air quality affected by the pandemic and fire smoke so at this point we know that technologies have been have improved and we're looking at increased hepa filters the ability to in pull in fresh air at all times when that's safe to

169do so and to make sure that also there are efficiency measures in place so that machines aren't running all day and all night long and we can also make sure that the systems are actually up and running each and every school day i would uh also recommend as uh my experience tells me that it still lands at the end of the day with some sense of control in the classroom by the teacher who can make sure that the temperature is adjusted accordingly without having a separate centralized control at the district office where somebody else determines what the ambient temperature should be um so thank you for your question anything else to add to you i'd like to add too uh that this obviously is very important topic right now we currently uh uh are doing

170what we call the covet risk assessment for one of our clients that we are actually going uh room by room not only sorry i think the timer just changed but real briefly in addition to just air quality we want to make sure that there are uh face mask available gloves the uh sanitizers all that so we're checking room by room and i and i believe uh districts as a matter of course and practice should be doing that along with air filtration systems thank you besides all of the five projects that a previous board approved in 2014 and bond money was available and supposed to be spent to finish those border-proof projects in your expert opinion what are the safety issues that are needed to be addressed first and immediately and have you looked up the

171scope of the work on the emg report in 2018 the issues that need addressing [Music] so thank you for the question first of all i think with where we are right now the the priority issue should be the ventilation hvac system right because we don't know when this pandemic will end so i believe of the the the projects that should take precedence and be prioritized would be hvac systems in addition to that there are some day-to-day things that i believe exists in alum rock right now for example in your playgrounds in your pavement areas there are a lot of alligator not just alligator cracks but really deep depressions that potentially if you have not experienced a great deal of it yet that students can get hurt so i think anything that's related to safety should

172be addressed playgrounds so um those would be what we believe if you have a certain limited amount of money uh all of it should be uh focused towards what is going to be creating a safe environment for your students do you have anything just as a i mean at hayward unified again when we started with that broke bond program two and a half years ago our team i mean myself i'm a licensed architect and a licensed general contractor we put three teams together and we did our own visual site assessments and walked every single campus walked into every classroom we took photographs we developed the matrix of conditions of different things not in a detailed sense but we can you know come in and help you identify the issues and walk your sites and look

173for things and then we can work with you and your staff to prioritize that based on budget and funding available and i could add one more caveat to that i just finished a facilities master plan recently for a school district in california the teachers and the principals knew where the safety hazards were they're the ones getting the injury reports at the office manager's desk and they could point out which crack needed filling or which trip hazard or other issue became apparent so part of this assessment is actually listening to the staff on the campus thank you and the next uh last but not least questions will be provided by vice president some of these questions were asked in the the initial information or the rfp those that was put out but um it's been a

174while the information is somewhat dated so i wanted to provide the opportunity for all firms to go ahead and respond to this uh have you had any recent litigation or significant conflict uh within the last 10 years with any of your clients and so please collaborate thank you for the question uh mr quintero tri group has never been sued or any claims have been brought against us not just in the last 10 years but since the existence of the firm for the last 34 years so we have never been involved in litigation we've never been sued we've never had any significant in fact let's say we've never had any conflict with any of our clients um so we're it's again integrity is very important to our firm as i've said earlier we'd much rather walk

175from a contract than be part of anything that's questionable um so we're happy to report to you that you know our answer to this is very brief because we've just never have been involved in these kinds of situations thank you all right the next one is please explain your pricing structure you include automatic escalators and any overhead in your proposals please provide an example of items for which you typically build a district once again the this is information that's here the idea is to allow the public to be aware of what what they're in for because they're ultimately the ones that are paying for this thank you we really looked at uh you know being a former um school district administrator we've been all of us actually have been a lot of our team members

176have been on the other side and one of the things that i believe is important is for school districts to deal with credible and reputable firm that once a contract has been agreed upon that is a contract right so as a matter of course once it's been signed we don't even look at the contract again because we know that we are so focused in delivering quality work for you the board the administration again but most importantly for your students so when we look we basically look at our pricing this way once there is an agreed upon price that is our price we never go back to you asking you for additional money uh or again nickel and diming the district that's never been our practice in fact we give a lot of freebies to our

177clients we never charge them for the only time that we would go back to the district to revisit the fee is that the district wants us to do something that's over and beyond what was in the original scope of the program and we believe that is a reasonable conversation to have because when things change then you know there's a potential uh additional efforts uh that might be required so we would like to have that conversation but if everything has been defined by the district and once we agreed on that fee we guarantee that we will never go back to you for additional fees we will finish it from start to end and part again of our principles in the end if we didn't do our calculation right and we end up losing money we lose

178money we will never go back and ask for more that's just that's just how we operate as simple as that there's a fee agreed upon and we stick to that fee we'll never ask you for anything extra thank you so much and this concludes our interview for today um if you can please uh wait in the room while we figure things out and then call you back at some point thank you for your patience and uh great thank you very much that's the opportunity to be here thank you thank you so trustees at this point uh we will tally up our scores we will submit our forms um our staff will then support us in telling everything up and putting the totals together and then presenting those at some point i see jess at the

179podium do you have anything to add mr serna well um we're almost there um um at this point you have the four sheets on your laptop um i think and if you need some assistance that maybe down the end may help you if you think you need it at the end of each you press the submit button that score gets submitted and then we will tabulate all the scopes at the end um i i don't know um if you will need to have any more public comments at any point at this point uh prior to probably just prior to your vote i believe that phone call yes thank you um so during this time as we are telling up um our google forms just uh wanting to ask my peers and uh necessarily see you

180here um are you okay with having public comment first and then finalizing our forms uh i i already submitted and we got to figure out this um i think we need to put our i can't hear you ernesto so we need to figure out so i can hear what you're saying um give us one second and thank you all for your patience as you all know we're doing our best to ensure that our public is involved that we're as transparent as possible that we're able to do i'll deal with all the technical difficulties so thank you for um being patient with us let's try it again trustee can you hear me yes okay i already pushed my submit button on all of my so mine are submitted so i'm okay either way okay um are

181you all okay he's okay with taking public comment at this time any oppositions to taking public comment at this time okay so mr chavez can you help us with public comment um any members of the public wishing to address the board uh yes madam president at this time we have no public comment okay um okay i'll wait a couple seconds see if we have anybody pressing on that button do we now there's still none okay all right so at this time uh we will finalize the completion of our google forms um danielle is here to help us if we need support in submitting any of the forms thank you and thank you public for your patience if i make president uh that i i believe our staff will be able to allow you allow to

182display the final totals at the end correct so we are going to be submitting the forms and then allowing time for staff to gather that so again public thank you for your patience okay i'm guessing jose and danielle are involved with the receiving and uh you all will let us know when we have that total um thank you again public for your patience and thank you staff for working so hard no pressure this is where we should have some background music i know right linda's gonna sing a song for us nice can you hear me yes well since we're waiting i'll take a quick opportunity to wish uh an alumrock graduate my daughter a happy 16th birthday we talked last month about our last meeting about how we all parents and families and teachers how

183we all work through a lot of special events to all of us and you know this it just speaks to the importance of this work that we're doing that we all make the decisions to you know i know people have worked through anniversaries and birthdays and things so so happy birthday to my daughter and and you know we're again it just shows the commitment all of us as a community have to getting this work done and doing it right happy birthday to her can you say her name her full name yes for sochi beautiful happy birthday thank you for letting your dad hang out with us i swear it would be more fun to be hanging out with you oh my so ernesto what type of cake did you buy for her 16th birthday uh

184we're actually gonna go do something tomorrow because of tonight's meeting so she'll she'll she'll let us know that tomorrow so we're postponing it delaying it for one day i thought you were going to say you're going to sing a song but i mean i'm not i'm not a singer will be thankful for that yay we're almost we're almost there public exciting times so a day we've a lot of us have been waiting for especially those of us in this room and trustee in his home [Music] so are we gonna is are all of the um applicants gonna come into the room and then we're gonna pop it on the screen or do we know what that process is gonna look like already good question yeah maybe we can good question and dr um bauer just

185mentioned that we can probably bring in the reps um to then have that total be seen by all of us at the same time for safe percussion reasons unfortunately we can't have everybody here um but uh jess you know more or less the timing should we start calling in the reps the representation they have two or three right reps the from each three more or four the three people per person there will be 12 people i don't know if that's too many yeah or maybe we group them in each kind of corner they want to all come in um [Music] make sure yeah let's do that safety precautions especially with this variant and our numbers going up so let's call in the representatives whoever they choose to um get that total um and you know

186more or less the timing because i know it'll take some time to bring them in and maybe we can start bringing them in one performer we'll get we'll get a copy of this um will we get a copy with the spreadsheet of everybody's total yeah like you know because we'll see the totals here but i mean the one that has everybody exposing like everything that we put the last time we saw the one with everything kind of like how in my appointment interview yeah yeah yeah we saw everything i think that's been the kind of the practice that we've developed over time for appointments and i think i remember seeing just everybody's scores and i think that was even initially part of the purpose of the the google forms kind of thing is to be

187able to automatically tabulate collect and visualize all those scores let me uh ask staff and make sure that that's how i just don't want to say yes right and that's not what they have but it all makes sense exactly what you're all seeing mr cernak can you confirm that if we're going to have so we're going to have kind of a help we've had when mr pham was appointed when i was appointed um we'll have a total on the screen but that will have access to or even on the screen i guess it would be shown you want access to the individual sport well that's a question for danny yes please so if that's going to take a little longer so you can let them know if you can check in with them right i

188know they're coordinating that right now danielle are you listening to us and i don't expect yes okay awesome thank you we have awesome staff all around i think if we've collected it as we did in the past hopefully it's this when you do it like that it automatically populates a google sheet so hopefully that'll be visible available yes come on in as we're all waiting patiently anxiously like waiting for our final grade just a reminder to everybody thank you for your patience it's our first time back having this hybrid mode uh learning about you know what creates echoes what where we need to turn on and off so um but we have great staff taking care of things as they pop up so blessed with that i know that um every meeting let's roll back

189hopefully and are able to be back um it'll just get better and better and that we're able to provide um continue to provide the transparency the information um to our public and all those that have an interest in what we're doing here at alan rock um just very proud of uh everything that we've done already uh where we've been and what we've been through to where we're at now and where we're going so anxiously waiting the for the outcome and uh looking forward to continue to work with you all in one way shape or form you never know and i heard that i broke a record of our last board meeting up ending early so now i'm working on breaking my own record today it didn't happen but in the future in the future it

190might it might always another chance i have till december and at the rate we're going we're having special board meetings every uh every week it seems like so i'll have plenty of opportunities so when we get the totals hopefully it's clear well either way you know we have to break a tie you know we'll do that but if it's clear then um at that point we've already done public comments we will ask for the motion for that law that firm i'm sorry and then a second and then vote on it can i ask a question about the process now or do you want to wait until we get to that motion i think since we have time it's good to ask questions now um i know we mentioned we have the alternate questions that we're

191going to go with if there is a type um and then break the tie in that way okay so my question is once we get to the point um to be kind of finishing up the process here is the is what the staff needs is it a emotion that reflects the actual decision of the firm that's chosen or is it more in the form of a recommendation because um i'm assuming that once we give our get our results tonight there's some potential negotiation that needs to occur with regards to pricing and you know just all of the the specifics and maybe some further reference type work so i'm just wondering if we're going to be um putting on the table a motion to just like solid move forward with this firm or the recommendation that

192staff moves forward in vetting the firm and then moving forward as appropriate good question and you just reminded me of a conversation we had um so yes you're right uh it won't be just a solid because we do have some pending facts and some of the things you mentioned and then also um our staff will be looking jess do you want to go into more detail on that any other information it sounded like the question was after the is displayed there will be a vote on behalf of the board will officially vote to select the top rated firm to be the permits yes but also pending um we i remember i was talking about pending a background correct that's correct yes um and so making sure that we're clear on that right before we present

193that um so do you want to talk about those details or do you want me to go in further all right i think okay i know we have it in writing because i know we've discussed this so cover if you can help us maybe with that i know we put it in writing um i do remember and or just correct me if i'm missing anything um that um based on today's winner um it'll still be pending the background check further uh background check and then just like trustee picarano mentioned you know contracts and details um to be worked out and insured by both parties um am i missing anything on that cabrera no i don't think can you hear me yes um no i don't think so um here says the firm receiving the highest

194high score will be selected as the finalist and will be subject to a thorough background check if the final list is not clear background check the runner-up will be selected as the finalist and will be subject to a thorough background check and this process will continue until the fine is the final list clears background check so i hope that was clear thank you chelsea for your questions um any and good question and i'm glad we're saying that before uh we select the final one so i really appreciate that um any questions comments on that item good point that trustee personal is making okay i think daniel is ready to display the uh final tabulation uh one second daniel uh before we do that trustee so i heard that you know it is pending background checks

195but i know that in part of the questions that that we asked um the firms to respond to it also makes reference to pricing being negotiable so do we want to put into our motion specifically background check or should we just say some pending further um final vetting by the district by district staff or something like that and then that would include background checks any negotiation that needs to happen around pricing and any other things that that you know staff needs to cover i just i'm just a little worried that if we say background checks only but then they pass the background checks but if we can't come to some agreement on pricing then we kind of get stuck in a little something there so agreed and maybe um at the time when we make

196that motion if you want to make that motion and then somebody can second in um i think we're ready for the results um so as soon as we see the results if you want to put that motion out including that i like that the betting um and then hopefully one of us will second that and then we'll move forward thank you just and um are we ready yes okay without further ado here we go okay so we see the totals um trustee vegarano i i don't know if you want to help us with the motion um based on this are we going to see the the individual votes as well i couldn't hear somebody said something but actually so we could scrutinize those later we see the finals so can we i'm ready to make

197a motion i mean i'm just thinking in the interest of the public just to be like hyper transfer [Music] and if anybody sees some issues with um but the scores aren't reflecting when you submit it then now is the time to speak well we wouldn't know if it reflected what we submitted unless we saw the scores right can you hear me can you repeat that yeah i said we wouldn't know if it reflected the scores that we submitted individually unless we see the the individual tallies and again i'm i'm you know maybe going a little overboard but i just doing this and i guess in an abundance of transparency to make sure that it's very particularly with this um this specific contract that we're just super transparent about the selection process and especially because it's

198it's a very close vote so you know my my thought is just in the interest of being very transparent about how things were scored and not having to come back to that at a later date based on some questioning agreed let me check them with stuff okay danielle are you able to uh put the totals um per trustee and our submissions on a table okay he is working on that so thank you for your patience and i agree um [Music] a couple minutes more i hate to say i hate to add to the the time here but you know i just i think it's important no we're all with you uh trust me but i know we're all in agreement uh just trying to manage your the speaker here your voice the mu button believe

199me uh allowing you to speak pausing speaking but know that our staff are working diligently right now behind the scenes to get that information out and i'm in agreement for transparency reasons so thank you all for your patience okay here we have it uh the totals and um i'll leave them up i know each one will probably want to confirm that our numbers are correct so um as you can see the name of the firm is on top and the totals are okay i there that's i mean at this point i think first of all thank you um staff will say or whoever um is doing this it's an important part of the work tonight and i think at this point it's sufficient anyone who has questions can look at the youtube video or you

200know wherever they need you to reference it but now we've shown the votes so at this point then i would make a motion to um for us to have staff move forward with the top um top points for um as our as our firm that we contract with for this work uh pending any final vetting necessary by staff that's the motion [Music] i would suggest that uh maker of the motion to say who who the top scorer the person who got the top support or the organization that top square that way there's no question once again uh trustee if you can repeat the total scores as uh board vice president quintero suggested um do you need him to repeat that um i'll i can i just amend the motion to reflect that the top point

201getter is the coming firm followed by kich kicho jenkins gales and martinez and try group in the event of the need to go down the list based on that vetting process that i mentioned perfect uh yes and it was just seconded by vice president quintero and at this point i'm going to go ahead and call for the vote unless there's any questions comments or concerns by any of the trustees before we go there okay see none uh go ahead and just call your name as uh i have you here and on the screen uh trustee linda chavez trustee minfam and myself i'm passes unanimously uh thank you so much um so uh welcome cummings and thank you to all of you for uh interviewing with us tonight and uh we look forward to continue to

202be in community somehow or other uh and um yeah thank you everybody thank you public for your patience in this uh first hybrid meeting um and we'll see you soon again yes adjourning this meeting at 9 23. thank you good night