San Diego International Airport (Submission 2)

San Diego International Airport

Overview:

The San Diego International Airport is an extremely dynamic use environment and, as such, requires a high level of maintenance to ensure proper operation for the traveling public. The recent economic climate and the troubles associated with the airline industry have had a significant impact upon the necessary staffing to ensure the desired level of care. This staff shortage forced the Facilities Management Department (FMD) to focus on a new way of providing services without increasing full time staff and, therefore, adding to the overall long-term financial burden to the airport.

The need existed for a high-quality trade-based group of contractors that could deploy forces quickly in response to the airport's identified needs, many times within 24 hours. This dynamic environment precluded the use of traditional contracting for services, job order contracting or even the utilization of temp agencies for the augmentation of staff.

We then hit upon the idea of establishing a pool of pre-qualified, individual trade contractors that could be placed under an existing on-call service contract. This would then allow us to dispatch work to the individual trade pools rapidly, while still maintaining our need as a public agency to seek open competition.

The initial program consisted of electrical, plumbing, painting, flooring and general construction services, the latter being focused on contractors that can self-perform general construction projects and not general contractors. In all cases, the airport acts as the general contractor and coordinates the various services using in-house staff.

Once FMD identified the services needed, we began working with our legal and risk departments to determine the minimum requirements for a contractor to work in the airport environment. This was done to ensure the maximum participation by local small businesses that traditionally could not work at the airport due to the large amount of administrative requirements involved in a public works bid and maintenance contracting programs.

All processes were reviewed to reduce the administrative burden to the absolute minimum. Although the overall monetary capability of the contracts are large, they are limited to a per task amount of $100,000, with a minimum guarantee of $5,000. These limits enabled the reduction of insurance requirements and liability and further ensured the participation of small businesses.

Upon resolution of the legal and administrative issues, a program of outreach to local service providers was initiated to seek out and encourage maximum participation. This not only resulted in a high level of participation but had the additional side effect of introducing many companies to the future job possibilities at the airport and the requirements that they would need to meet to participate in those programs. After the outreach event had occurred a formal request for qualifications was issued again, using the minimum requirements for submission. The respondents were evaluated and interviewed prior to selection of the core group of providers.

As projects are identified the airport prepares a scope of work and then meets with the service providers for that trade. Each is provided with a copy of the scope and attends a job site walkthrough. Attendance is required to ensure that all participants have the same information on which to base their bid. Tasks may be evaluated both on time-response requirements or cost, depending upon the needs of the airport and can vary in complexity.

The program results have been dramatic. Since the inception of the program 18 months ago, we have performed in excess of $5,000,000 work with an extremely high degree of success and quality. This success has driven the expansion of the program to now include over 40 individual service providers that augment permanent staff on a task basis and has also provided significant contribution to the local economy and small businesses at a time when the recession is severely affecting their potential survivability.

As a direct result of this program, many of the small business contractors have become knowledgeable of public-agency-contracting processes and are now being utilized in the $1 billion terminal-expansion program here at the airport. We view this program as a significant success, not only internally but one that has had wide reaching positive impacts upon the community we serve.

In-house participants:

Joe Fejeran, Facilities Management, Contracts Manager

Jamie Quintero, Small Business Development, Program Coordinator

Bob Silvas, Director, Small Business Devlopment

Wayne Harvey, Director, Facilties Management