Section 7.7 Procurement of Professional Services

Grant Administration: Section 7.7 Procurement of Professional Services

This section describes steps that are required to help ensure grantees comply with federal and state procurement requirements in the procurement of professional services.

Step 1: Prepare the RFP/RFQ The Grantee must prepare an (RFP). An example of an RFP and RFQ are provided as Attachment 7-7: Sample Request for Proposals and Attachment 7-8: Sample Request for Qualifications.

Step 2: Solicit Responses In order to meet the goals of MBE/WBE participation; the Grantee must submit the RFP/RFQ to the New Hampshire Department of Transportation.

Step 3: Publish RFP/RFQ The Grantee must advertise the RFP/RFQ publicly by publishing in local newspaper of daily general circulation. Attachment 7-9: Sample RFP Publication and Attachment 7-10: Sample RFQ Publication

• Specialized experience or technical expertise of the firm and its personnel in connection with the type of services to be provided and the complexity of the project.
• Past record of performance on contracts with the locality and other clients, including quality of work, timeliness, cost control, and citizen’s complaint resolution in a timely manner.
• Capacity of firm to perform the work within time limitations, taking into consideration the current and planned workload of the firm.
• Familiarity of the firm with the type of problems applicable to the project.
• An evaluation consideration to small, local, minority or female owned firms. These firms may be awarded extra points in order to promote the employment of these firms.

The relative importance of each of these factors should be determined beforehand by assigning values to each (e.g., experience may be assigned 30 points out of a possible 100 points).

Step 4: Establish Evaluation Committee Appoint an evaluation team of knowledgeable members (town council, board of public works members, etc.) and develop an evaluation plan to rank respondents and provide guidance during the selection process. Typically, three to five people make up the Evaluation Committee. At least one of the committee members should be the Authorized Official (AO) or designee. An example of a scoring criteria evaluation document is Attachment 7-11 Professional Services Evaluation.

Step 5: Open Responses Proposals must be received at the address stated in the legal advertisement, logged in and marked with the date and time received prior to being opened and submitted to the Evaluation Committee for review. Any proposal not received by the date and time stated in the legal advertisement must be returned, unopened to the submitter.

Step 6: Make Vendor Selection If interviews are conducted, each member of the Evaluation Committee must complete an Interview Evaluation and Score Sheet for each vendor short listed. Each scorer must use the same scoring and weighting criteria making their best effort to score each proposal fairly and without bias. These documents will be required at monitoring. Following the Evaluation Committee’s review, the vendor whose proposal is determined to be the most advantageous to the project, based upon qualifications, price and other factors may be selected.

Caution: Be aware of potential conflicts of interest. Some firms have the capacity to administer projects and design buildings or public facilities systems. It is considered a conflict of interest for the firm in charge of administration to also be in the position to oversee the engineering for a project. There can also be conflicts in the areas of rehab inspection, lead based paint testing, surveying, etc.

Step 7: Notify Successful and Unsuccessful Proposer(s) The Grantee must notify all successful and unsuccessful vendors, in writing.

Step 8: Prepare a Contract: Once a firm is chosen and the basis of selection is documented along with the reasonability of cost, it is time to start the preparation of a contract with the successful individual or firm. See Section 7.10: Contract Requirements below for information.

Step 9: Execution of Contract(s) The Grantee may execute contracts with the successful vendor after they have received Release of Funds from CDFA.