Fort Myers City Council denied City Manager Marty Lawing’s recommendation to reject all proposals submitted for the redevelopment of City of Palms Park and reissue Request for Proposals during a Feb. 20 meeting.
“I’m used to being in between a rock and a hard place,” Lawing said. “The focus I had is looking at what is in the best interest of the city. This is one of our catalyst sites, and we don’t need a dark cloud over it if there’s any view of impropriety.”
Despite his reasonings, Lawing’s recommendation failed in a tied 3-3 vote. Council member Terolyn Watson was not present and did not cast a vote.
“I don’t think it’s fair to the individual that won it to have to bid against themselves,” council member Fred Burson said while explaining his opposition to the recommendation. “Once it’s awarded like that and the other side knows what you’ve offered, they can always come back and sweeten the deal. And I just think we need to go ahead and stick with the recommendation that we had back in early January.”
Council member Teresa Watkins Brown agreed with Burson, stating it would be disrespectful to Pitch Prime to reject all proposals after it was already chosen to redevelop the property. “For us to continue on with this, paying over a half a million dollars of taxpayer’s money to continue to maintain this stadium when we clearly have somebody in place that [already went through the] process is very dishonorable on us as a city for not following through.”
Lawing’s recommendation followed a string of events over the last two months, starting Jan. 4 with the day of presentations from four developers. Pitch Prime scored the highest and was allowed to begin negotiations with the city.
At the time, Mayor Kevin Anderson questioned the scoring choice of council member Liston Bochette, who gave zeroes across the board for each developer except for Radd Sports LLC.
“How can five of us see varying degrees of criteria being met and you see none?” Anderson asked Bochette at the meeting.
Bochette said he viewed it as a winner-take-all process.
United Soccer League was second highest ranked developer. The league filed a written notice of an intent to protest Jan. 11 with a surety check in the amount of $10,000.
Some of the objections and concerns by the USL included how Council demonstrated bias by failing to rank and score the proposals in accordance with the requirements detailed in the RFP and how the scoring of compliance with the minority business enterprises policy was delegated to staff and not conducted by the evaluation panel.
As far as the minority business scoring, Lawing said that is a typical practice. As for the scoring in general, he stated what was outlined in the RFP was meant to be an aid in the decision-making process.
The dispute committee then met Jan. 31, where it was recommended in a 3-2 vote that the city manager should initiate negotiations with top-ranked firm Pitch Prime as previously authorized by Council.
The city’s entire procurement process was questioned because of the City of Palms RFP.
“I really want to make sure that the process can be defended, that whether you like it or not, the process is what the process is, which is still being disputed,” council member Darla Bonk said, who voted in favor of Lawing’s recommendation.
City staff is working on preparing a future work session for proposed revisions to the procurement process following comments made by some council members Feb. 20.
“To be really candid, I’m sick of getting sued because we aren’t keeping things up to date,” Bonk said. “I would like us to work on getting the policies and plans and all those kinds of things up to date so it’s very clear.”
The three nay voters were council members Brown, Burson and Johnny Streets.
