HYBRID CONTRACTING: Alternative Models for using professional trail contractors in conjunction with other groups such as volunteers, job corps, and in-house crews
I've been a trail contractor for over 30 years. (In a previous life, I was a college administrator--yes, I know, figure out that connection!)
In the vast majority of earlier work, my company bid on previously designed projects, mostly for the Forest Service. If successful, we followed the requirements of carefully developed specifications and, under the watchful eye of government inspectors, sought to achieve the desired results while hopefully generating sufficient profit to keep the business afloat.
Along the way, I joined the Western Trailbuilders Association and found a cadre of like minded crazies who get together annually to commisserate and share war stories about the wild world of trail contracting. Ah, can we tell tales!
In recent years, I have focused more on marketing my services to entities, mostly in the Southwest, who either do not have strong in-house capabilities for trail design and construction or who simply need another resource to call upon. I have put together many design/build projects and worked in cooperation with a host of these other groups in building some great trails.
I'd like to share some ideas and approaches I've developed along the way and in the process crow a bit about the kinds of expertise available from us professional trail contractors. Some of our WTBA members have been engaged, since our conference in Reno in February, in a lively internet discussion about hybrid contracting. So it's a work in process and your feedback and questions would be most welcome.
I must admit at the outset that I learned a great deal by building trails according to the more tradtional, time-tested contracting model--I suspect that all of us in WTBA would readily acknowledge that we honed our skills, discovered ways of operating along with the best materials and trail- specific equipment by working within the structure of formal, pre-designed projects.
In fact, despite any number of scars from projects that did not turn out well or that happened only after prolonged and painful disputes over the exact meaning of the written plans, we would most assuredly point with pride at what was achieved through this process. No question, there is much to recommend the traditional contractor/owner model in building quality trails.
In fact, sometimes we get downright defensive about this process.
When it seems that our hard-earned expertise is not adequately appreciated and/or when other taxpayer supported or so-called "free" services are used instead of us, you would probably hear us singing the praise of contract accountablility and the free enterprise system. And if that didn't work, we might shade over into muted grumbling, and possibly even whining about unfair competition. We might resort to parading out some prominent horror stories of trail and associated resource damage caused by these other well- meaning groups; along with strong arguments that, in terms of long term sustainability, any apparent cost savings by use of these groups exclusively would turn out to be quite illusory. Cost, we would insist, is never just the initial outlay--it has to do with what lasts over time, with hidden overhead paid by our tax dollars for the care and feeding of in-house crews, with the old fashioned importance of contract accountablilty. Yes, we tend to get downright patriotic when the value of the profit incentive is ignored in favor of what we might sloganize as "make work" substitutes. (I know, get out the violins!)
But truthfully, when all is said and done, few would totally dismiss the proposition that, for timely completion, tight quality control, and long term cost effectiveness, contracting would usually be the preferred mode. In fact, Forest Service data suggests that contracting, when compared with alternative methods of getting trails built, does tend to produce the best bang for the buck. And for that reason, for many of my colleagues and for many agency people, the traditional model will continue to be the primary or maybe the only method by which they build trails.
But to be balanced, of course, we would also have grudgingly to acknowledge that there are some projects by truly responsible volunteers, crack job corps teams, and competent force account crews that are fully as good as anything we contractors have built. And, beyond that, there are any number of good reasons why an agency or other trail entity might seek out the services of volunteers, user groups, job corps, prisoners, in-house crews, etc., instead of contractors. These reasons would include: perceived cost savings, community service values and the importance of job training programs for youth, the restrictions of grants, the desire to promote strong user group interest and skill training, lack of knowledge about the availablity of experienced trail contractors, and a wish to develop trail building competence in-house because of work volume and the need for a ready pool of trained people.
When the decision about how to get a project accomplished is being contemplated, the working assumption quite likely is that it must be an either/or approach--either put the project out to bid and hope to find a qualified contractor or turn to one of these other groups. Rarely would it be recognized, at least from a practical standpoint, that it might be possible or even desirable to combine these resources in ways that would optimize the advantages of both. Or they simply might not know of the availability of qualified contractors who could provide design/build services or who are sufficiently flexible and willing to perform in conjunction with these other kinds of workers.
My purpose here is to describe and urge consideration of some of these alternative approaches and point to various ways they might be utilized by agencies and trail advocacy groups to achieve really good results.
I have come to call such work "hybrid contracting" and I increasingly believe, in this era of partnership development and keen interest in trails, that these alternative models may provide the best of both worlds-- realizing quality results from contract accountability while at the same time promoting community service values and real world skill advancement by engaging these other resource groups.
To make my argument more clear let me mention a couple of contextual examples from my own experience, one a winner and the other a loser, which perhaps will illustrate just how a contractor might be used in conjunction with other groups and what might happen when such expertise is ignored:
The Winner: I just completed a project for the City of Scottsdale in Arizona at Pinnacle Peak. This trail was built originally by hand methods and wasn't bad by those capabilities. However, over the past several years, I believe that close to 5000 volunteer hours were spent attempting to upgrade and maintain the trail, and still it was too narrow and too dangerous, for equestrians especially and as a result the trail has been closed. I was hired as a consultant initially to come up with a plan, if feasible, to solve these problems. We are talking about very heavy rock presence. They liked the ideas I presented, and asked us to re-build the trail along the lines recommended. (We actually did a subcontract for the contractor who was building their million dollar trailhead facility, rather than going through a formal bid process--Scottsdale has very creative administrators!) By use of equipement and knowhow, we transformed the trail into something really special that, I believe, graphically illustrates what our kind of expertise (ie. the experienced, equipment-savvy trail contractor) can provide.
Quite frankly, they could have spent another 5000 hours of volunteer help and never come close to what we could do in an intensive two month project. Now that it's there, the volunteers have something they can stay on top of through various maintenance efforts. That kind of cooperative interaction between expertise and "free" volunteer assistance makes better sense than an either/or approach.
The loser--Some time ago, I was asked by a City that backs up into the mountains in the Los Angeles basin, to look at an area for a re- routed trail that was in fairly difficult ground for which they had received a County grant. I told them I had good news and bad news. The good news was they could build the trail, the bad news was their grant was too small. I did suggest the possibility of using CCC help for the hand work following our
design and machine construction as a way of holding down the costs.
I later heard that, using an amateur designer, they had then literally turned the C's loose on the hillside. The result was one of the worst examples of resource damage and God-awful mess you have ever seen. It was a huge waste of taxpayers money and probably violated all the County's regulations about what to do on hillside construction. By not using contractor expertise, to save money, they now have something that is extremely unsafe and probably a serious liability hazard. By the way, they asked me to come back in afterwards and tell them how to fix the trail; I was so mad, after walking less than half way, I turned around and went home. I simply could not bear to deal with this mess, but I confess the privately expressed "I told you so's" were a twisted form of recompense. Unfortunately, I'm guessing the ugliness remains.
There are four types of alternative, hybrid contracting approaches I want to mention. I am sure there are other variations, but these should provide some starting points:
1. Design/build contracts: Obviously, this is not an entirely new concept, but it has been used infrequently for trails. My approach with a number of city, county and developer projects has been significantly less formalized than might be necessary if our work was not already known to them and if we had not established a level of trustworthiness and competence from work with them and other clients with similar projects. In other word, this informality clearly is enabled only after a period of establishing credibility with a mix of such clients.
At their request, I typically begin by writing a brief proposal in which I lay out several phases of work. Since I have some idea about the project to begin with, the design phase is priced on a lump sum basis to include a physical layout, a description of any structures proposed, written specifications (adapted to this project from the Forest Service Specs with which I am quite familiar), time commitment, etc.
I can, in most cases, especially where the work is fairly straightforward, price the construction phase at this time as well. However, where the work is less clear at the outset, I can provide a rough estimate to be confirmed or altered after the design work is complete and after they have approved or not the various recommendations offered. I also provide a one year warranty for any defects that occur as a result of faulty work in fulfillment of the specifications, as well as insurance and license information.
I usually also offer a third phase, a one year maintenance agreement for a nominal fee. I believe this is advantageous as most of the obvious problems tend to show themselves during the first year. And if we are responsible for coming back to fix any maintenance problems, then we have a stake in assuring the trail is built to a high level of sustainability to begin with.
But, as in the case of Pinnacle Peak mentioned above, this maintenace phase can be where the volunteers or even agency maintenance staff take over. I contend that a trail built to standards enabled by our equipment and knowhow, and upon which our reputation is built, will be considerably easier for others to maintain.
I am speaking here about my own more or less informal approach which, as I say, might not work for larger procurement systems such as the Forest Service. But the creation of design/build contracts for trails apparently is on the agenda of that agency, at least partly because so many of their trail design experts have retired. A few such contracts have been let, but to my taste and admittedly skewed viewpoint, they seem to be mired in rather cumbersome, overly formalized procedures which don't necessarily evoke the full creative potential this approach offers.
My advice would be to select trail contractors much like they would architects using a Request for Proposal (ROP) foremat. Candidates would submit a portfolio of completed projects similar to that contemplated in this instance, along with references and recommendations. A preliminary idea of how the contractor would propose to handle the specific project would be indicated along with a cost estimate.
These proposals would be culled down to a "short list" of finalists who would be invited in for an interview--or possibly, because of distance constraints, this could be done via phone or mail. The contractor would be selected, then, on a mix of track record and proposed approach, with price a factor but not the only or even the primary one.
Design/build clearly is a form of hybrid contracting that alters the way a project is perceived and administered.
2. Contractor as consultant for work by others: One of our WTBA members, Jim Angell, has made a career out of providing his services to agencies and user groups as a design expert and as a supervisor/trainer for volunteer work groups. Mostly these are projects that use people power, hand tools, and winches rather than heavier equipment. But it's an interesting and, for Jim and his clients, a very viable form of hybrid contracting. Jim was the featured presenter at our last WTBA conference where, nearing retirement, he shared extensively from a vast storehouse of successful trail projects throughout the country. More and more, I see the value of using the repository of expertise from the professional trail contractors. For a sense of the impressive magnitude of experience represented among its 38 member, see WTBA's website at www.trailbuilders.org.
3. Projects done in conjunction with others: I have contracted around a dozen projects in recent years in which we have worked alongside job corps teams, volunteers, and in-house crews. In some, we did the design and layout and the initial machine work while others did the hand work; or we came in to do a specialized aspect of a project for which the California Conservation Corps (CCC), as the primary work group, had been hired under the supervision of the agency.
Such projects do call for a certain level of creativity on the part of the agency reps because they tend to fly in the face of usual procedural requirements. At the last California Trails Conference we did a session about this and featured two different city trail representatives who described just how they set up these contracts. It's admittedly a creative (aka tricky) process!
* Terry Hanson, from the City of Redding, CA, described a private development where the trail was part of the developer's responsibility. He wanted to assure that the trail was built to the City's and the local trail committee's requirements and suggested to the developer that he consider hiring me to do the design work and provide funds directly to the City for actual construction. I did come up for a few days to do the design and layout and prepared a set of specifications. The City in turn gave the construction dollars to the local CCC, who have a regular trail crew, with the u nderstanding that they would put out a contract for the machine portion of the project. All of the work would be built according to the specifications I had written. We then bid on the project and were awarded the contract.
We subsequently built a second trail in this system which followed a similar pattern although in that case the land had been provided to the City by the BLM who held a proprietory interest in how the trail was built and how it impacted the ecosystem.
Glen Kinney from the Canejo Open Space District in Thousand Oaks, CA, described a grant they had received to repair a difficult section of trail in their extensive system. The City trail crew is well trained and owns a SWECO trail machine so they do much of their own work, but in this case the grant required most of the work be done by job corps type kids and, because of the heavy bedrock involved, their wider tracked SWECO was not a good option.
Also, the City has a $5,000 limit on the amount of funds they can commit for a private contract without going out to bid. So they hired us for a week to come in with our Takeuchi Excavator and expertise to build several switchbacks in these heavy rock areas. Their crew and the CCC were present to haul in rocks and gravel for the switchbacks and they continued with further aspects of the project after our departure.
Both of these are instances of hybrid contracting. We have done other small projects, as for example with the State Parks in the Santa Monica Mountains in which we worked in conjunction with their in-house crew providing our expertise to build a difficult mortored wall and rock steps near a waterfall.
I believe these kinds of projects make good sense for us and for the agency, and I would hope that new procedures are developed so it's less a process of circumvention and high wire improvization.
4. Hybrid contracting as an opportunity for on-going training:
Several of
the projects mentioned above have an informal training dimension whether stated or not. There is no reason why such projects could not be done in such as way as to make this more explicit at the outset. The contract could easily include an estimated amount of contactor time for focused explanations about the why's and how's in the trail building process, possibly some OJT in use of the equipment, etc... WTBA has proposed this idea to the new National Trail Training Partnership; we think actual projects are a great opportunity for developing excellent hands-on training programs.
Maybe this hybrid contracting is nothing really new, just a term that allows us to look at some fresh ways of doing business that accomplish what we all
want: Better trails on the ground, genuine cost effectiveness, and a sense of fulfillment by all those who contribute to realizing our mutual hopes.
ROGER BELL
AMERICAN TRAILS (formerly Trail Tracks)
2002