MAHONING COUNTY Landscaper's hiring leads to a dispute

The building is already being used.
By JOHN W. GOODWIN JR.
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
BOARDMAN -- The township's newest fire station is finished and final landscaping touches will soon be added, but not all township officials are happy with how the landscaper was hired.
Trustees hired Second Nature Landscape Services Inc. of Boardman on Tuesday to handle all landscaping concerns at the newly built South Avenue fire station. The cost will be $19,538.
Two other companies submitted bids to township officials for the contract.
Trustees Elaine Mancini and Tom Costello voted in favor of hiring the company; Trustee Kathy Miller voted against. Miller said she did not agree with the process used to make the hire.
Different designs
According to Miller, all three companies submitted different designs for the project because the township did not have design specifications in place. She said those bidding should have been made to bid on the same design specifications, otherwise the process is unfair.
"How can you make a decision on bids if they are not bidding on the same thing? This is sloppy work," she said. "My problem is with the process. We should have had specifications done that people could bid on. This is an unfair bidding advantage or could be seen that way."
Miller said township officials should have hired a design architect to prepare design specifications. Landscapers, she said, would then have had the opportunity to bid on the specifications laid out by the architect.
Miller said landscaping should have been figured into the building process and handled a lot earlier to give trustees more time to hire an architect. She said the issue of landscaping was hurried along at the last minute.
"We've had this contract going on for a year and at the last minute, they rush these three landscapers in and rush this through," she said.
Miller said she is not sure how much it would have cost the township to hire an architect, but she said it would have made the process more acceptable.
View on money
Mancini said, whatever the cost, hiring an architect to lay out specifications for landscaping at one fire station just was not worth the money.
"Why should we hire an architect? [Second Nature] submitted plans and to me they looked fine, so why should we hire someone to tell us what we should or should not be doing? I just don't think we needed to spend the money," she said. "Why should we spend thousands and thousands of dollars above what we have to accomplish the same thing?"
Mancini said those submitting bids used the township zoning department's regulations for landscaping as a guide when making bid proposals.
Miller also took issue with the purchase of an outdoor storage shed for the same fire station. Trustees said storage inside the facility should have been factored into the building plans, but was somehow left out.
The new fire station was finished last week and is being used. The cost of the building was about $1.2 million.
jgoodwin@vindy.com