City of Seattle
REQUEST FOR QUALIFICATIONS
Consultant Services
Seattle Fire Department:
Operational Analysis and Opportunities for
Efficiencies and Cost Savings
A Consultant Study Sponsored and Managed by
the City Budget Office and the Seattle City Council
Procurement Schedule
Table 1: Procurement Schedule
Schedule of Events / Date / LocationRFQ Release / April 10, 2012
Optional Pre-Submittal Conference / April 18, 2012
3:00 to 5:00 PM / City Budget Office
Memorial Conference Room
City Hall, Floor 6
600 4th Avenue
Seattle, WA 98104
Deadline for Questions / April 26, 2012
4:00 PM
Sealed Proposals Due to the City / April 30, 2012
4:00 PM / See next page.
The City anticipates the following dates for your planning purposes, although may adjust the schedule as needed by the City.
RFQ Interviews / May 7 and 8, 2012
Announcement of Successful Proposer(s) / May 11, 2012
Contract Execution / May 11, 2012
The City reserves the right to modify this schedule at the City’s discretion.
Notification of changes will be posted on the City website or as otherwise stated herein.
Procurement Contact
Project Manager: Pam Tokunaga
City Purchasing and Contracting Services
Seattle Municipal Tower
P.O. Box 94687
Seattle, WA 98124-4687
Table 2: Delivery Address
Physical Address (courier) / Mailing Address (For U.S. Postal Service mail)City Purchasing and Contracting Services.
Seattle Municipal Tower
700 Fifth Ave Ste 4112
Seattle, WA 98104-5042 / City Purchasing and Contracting Services.
Seattle Municipal Tower
P.O. Box 94687
Seattle, WA 98124-4687
Unless authorized by the Project Manager, no other City official or employee may speak for the City with respect to this solicitation. Any Proposer seeking information, clarification, or interpretations from any other City official or City employee is advised that such material is used at the Proposer’s own risk. The City will not be bound by any such information, clarification, or interpretation. Following the Proposal submittal deadline, Proposers shall continue to direct communications to only the City Project Manager. The Project Manager will send out information to responding companies as decisions are concluded.
Table of Contents
1. Purpose and Background. 4
2. Period of Performance. 5
3. Solicitation Objectives. 5
4. Minimum Qualifications. 5
5. Scope of Work. 6
6. Contract Modifications. 11
7. Instructions, Procedures and Requirements. 11
8. Response Format. 18
9. Selection Process. 20
10. Award and Contract Execution 21
1. Purpose and Background.
Purpose: The City of Seattle’s City Budget Office (CBO), in partnership with the Seattle City Council, is seeking a qualified consultant to assess the costs and the operational model of the Seattle Fire Department (SFD). This assessment, to be completed in three phases (full detail provided later), will include:
Phase I: A baseline management and operations analysis, and an opportunity assessment of short-term and long-term efficiency opportunities,
Phase II: An in-depth evaluation of short-term efficiency opportunities, and,
Phase III: An in-depth evaluation of the Fire Department’s management and operations and long-term operational efficiency opportunities.
The City of Seattle is requesting a comprehensive review of all aspects of Seattle Fire Department operations, including its management structure, as well as short-term and long-term opportunities to make adjustments to how these services are provided in order to achieve operational efficiencies and effectiveness and budgetary savings. The recommendations generated by this work should be ones that the City’s decision makers could consider implementing as early as 2013 in order to help partially address the City’s on-going budget challenges. On the heels of the Great Recession, the City of Seattle continues to face budgetary constraints. The City has made budget reductions to General Subfund-supported services (the primary funding source for the Fire Department) for four consecutive years. Reflecting the importance of preserving the City’s public safety functions, the Fire Department has avoided significant reductions. As the City enters the fifth year of budget reductions, the City’s ability to avoid budget reductions at the Fire Department becomes more challenging. The City is looking for recommendations that would allow the City to continue to provide high-quality emergency response and prevention services at lower financial expense.[1]
Background: The City of Seattle, a municipal corporation, provides an array of services to the residents, businesses and visitors of Seattle. Seattle has a Mayor-Council form of government, whereby the Mayor is responsible for all executive functions and manages the day-to-day operations of most City departments, including the Fire Department. The City Council oversees the City’s legislative processes, establishes City policy and adopts the City’s annual budget. The City of Seattle’s General Subfund budget for 2012 is approximately $917 million, which includes more than $160 million dedicated to the Fire Department. The City’s General Subfund shortfall for 2013 is currently estimated at $40 million, which highlights the importance of and continuing need to identify realistic and implementable options for efficiencies and budget savings at the Fire Department, and elsewhere in the City.
The Seattle Fire Department, founded in 1889, provides emergency response and prevention services to Seattle’s 610,000 residents and its daily population of approximately one million, spread out across a dense urban environment of 83.9 square miles. The Fire Department’s emergency responders must accommodate Seattle’s particular physical features and barriers, including a dense downtown core, high-rise development, close-in neighborhoods, lakes, marine waterways, bridges, hills, steep slopes and liquefaction zones and the City’s 193 miles of waterfront.
The Fire Department includes 998 uniformed personnel (on-duty strength: 210), which includes 39 chiefs and 76 paramedics, plus 81 civilian employees. SFD maintains 33 fire engines, 11 ladder trucks, 4 fire boats, 7 medic units and 4 aid cars, spread among 37 fire stations.
Seattle Fire Department services include:
• Fire suppression.
• Emergency medical response.
• Natural and human-caused disaster and hazardous materials response.
• Emergency rescue response, including high-altitude and marine rescues.
• Inspection of commercial, multi-residential, waterfront and maritime facilities.
• Hazardous activities permitting, fire and arson investigations and fire-safety and Fire Code compliance inspections.
• Fire prevention and preparedness assistance.
Please see Attachment #2, “Seattle Fire Department 2011 Emergency Response Report,” for a comprehensive discussion of Seattle Fire Department services, staffing and emergency response statistics.
2. Period of Performance.
Period of Performance: The period of performance for this contract is detailed in the table below.
Phase Name / Start Date / End Date / Funding AvailablePhase I: Preliminary Operations and Management Analysis, and Opportunity Assessment / May 11, 2012 / June 1, 2012 / $25,000
Phase II: Short-Term Opportunity Evaluation / June 1, 2012 / July 6, 2012 / $50,000
Phase III: Comprehensive Operations Analysis and Long-Term Opportunity Evaluation / Aug 20, 2012 / Jan 15, 2013 / $125,000
Total Funding Available: / $200,000
NOTE: Completion of Phase I and Phase II will not guarantee that a consultant will progress to Phase III. At the close of Phase II, the City of Seattle will evaluate the consultant’s performance, based on the quality of work submitted, and will decide whether or not to award Phase III to the consultant. Further detail is provided later in this document.
Funding Available: This is a competitive process.
Up to $200,000, total (as described above) is available for the Phase I, Phase II and Phase III assessments proposed in this RFQ process.
3. Solicitation Objective.
Solicitation Objective: The City expects to achieve the following outcome through this consultant solicitation:
. Identify and enter into a short-term contract with a consultant, or a group of consultants, with experience reviewing and assessing public safety operations for local governments, to complete an operational, management and efficiency analysis of the Seattle Fire Department.
4. Minimum Qualifications.
The minimum qualifications are required for a Consultant to be eligible to submit a RFP/RFQ response. Responses must clearly show compliance to these minimum qualifications. Those that are not clearly responsive to these minimum qualifications shall be rejected by the City without further consideration. The Desired Qualifications provide the qualifications that the City anticipates will be most successful through the selection process but are not required as a minimum submittal standard.
Minimum Qualification:
1) The consultant (the individuals performing the analysis) must have a minimum of three years continuous experience in providing public sector consulting services, including operations and management analysis of public safety and emergency response functions.
Desired Qualifications:
1) The consultant, or a member of the consultant’s team, should have experience as a uniformed member of a fire or emergency medical response agency.
2) The consultant should have public sector management experience, and should have experience evaluating the trade-offs of public safety budget pressures versus pressures to maintain funding for other local government services, and the relationship between emergency response standards and the cost of providing that service.
3) The consultant should be familiar with NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) 1710 metrics for emergency response, and should have experience evaluating computer-aided fire and emergency medical response-time modeling programs.
4) The consultant should have a minimum of five years continuous experience in providing public sector consulting services, including substantial experience in fire and emergency medical response consulting.
5) The consultant should have experience providing public safety consulting services to local government entities and/or jurisdictions in dense urban environments, with populations in excess of 300,000 persons.
5. Scope of Work.
The City of Seattle is seeking input from experts in the operations and management of fire response agencies on the following issues:
1. Analysis of the Seattle Fire Department’s existing operational and management model. Are there different models by which the Seattle Fire Department might provide its emergency response and prevention services in a more efficient manner, from a response time, staff deployment, apparatus deployment and/or financial perspective?
2. Analysis of operational and budgetary trade-offs. As the City continues to face General Subfund budget challenges are there opportunities to provide emergency response and prevention services at a lower cost while still maintaining industry standards for response times? Alternatively, what are the service trade-offs if operational or management changes need to be made in response to these budget challenges? How can Seattle maximize response time and effectiveness within these budget constraints?
This work will be completed in three phases. This solicitation will select a consultant based on the entire scope of all work. The Consultant must respond to and be prepared for all three phases of the work. Note, however, that the City reserves the right to include or withdraw the third phase of work prior to the start of the third phase. The City has provided a very specific schedule and tasks, although the City reserves the right to modify as required to fulfill the City’s needs.
Phase I.
· Preliminary Analysis of Fire Department Operations and Management and Identification of Short- and Long-Term Opportunities
May 11 to June 1, 2012. Funding Available: $25,000
During Phase I, the consultant (1) will conduct a preliminary analysis of the Fire Department’s management and operations. This will serve as the basis for future analysis of the Fire Department. During Phase I the consultant (2) will also conduct an opportunity analysis to identify short-term and longer-term opportunities for cost, management and operational efficiencies at the Seattle Fire Department for future analysis and review in Phases II and III.
a) Phase I will last approximately three weeks, and the Phase I Report will be due to the City of Seattle on Friday, June 1, 2012.
b) The consultant should conduct an impartial, third-party data-driven analysis on all items, and should rely on evidence-based practices and emergency-response theory to devise and evaluate all short-term and long-term efficiency proposals.
c) The Phase I Report will include a preliminary analysis of Fire Department management and operations, which will serve as a baseline assessment of the Fire Department’s organizational and management structure, and its operational performance.
d) The Phase I Report will identify a broad scope of opportunities for efficiencies, but will not include full analyses of these efficiencies, which will occur in the later phases of this project.
e) The Phase I Report will include specific descriptions of short-term and long-term opportunities for efficiencies, with rough detail on the magnitude of cost savings, labor impacts and/or service impacts associated with each item identified.
f) Short-term efficiencies are defined as cost reduction or revenue generation items that do not impact labor contracts and that can be substantively evaluated by July 6, 2012, in time for consideration for inclusion in the City’s 2013 budget.
g) Short-term efficiencies may include, but are not limited to: efficiencies in materials and supplies purchasing, staffing efficiencies among non-uniformed personnel, management efficiencies, consolidation or elimination of non-uniformed departmental functions and/or revenue enhancement opportunities.
h) Long-term efficiencies are defined as those operational changes, cost reduction items or revenue generation items that are complex in nature, that may require labor negotiations, that may impact emergency response time and/or capacity and that may result in a different deployment of staff, resources and apparatus for emergency response and prevention services. Long-term efficiencies will be more fully addressed in Phase III of this project.
i) Long-term efficiencies may include items such as: modifications to emergency-response crew size, modifying the type of apparatus deployed to respond to calls, different shift schedules, revising the number and location of fire stations and apparatusand reassessing management functions.
j) The Phase I Report should serve as a high-level workplan for the successive phases of this project, and should outline the additional analytical tasks that the consultant expects to undertake in these phases.
k) Upon the City’s acceptance of the Phase I Report, the City will make a Phase I payment of $25,000 to the consultant.
l) After submission of the Phase I Report, the consultant should be available to conduct briefings to the City Budget Office, the Mayor’s Office, the Seattle City Council, the Seattle Fire Department, the unions representing Seattle fire fighters, and other stakeholders, as needed, to present the findings of the Report.