The Hillsborough County evaluation committee voted informally to seek best-and-final-offer (BAFO) fixed-price unit bids for RFP25-00293, the county’s disaster recovery management program procurement, saying unitized pricing will let evaluators compare like items across proposals.

Committee chair Robert Hendrickson (Management and Budget) told colleagues the BAFO would not change the RFP’s scope but would ask proposers to break multi-year services into single, fixed-price units — for example, a loaded monthly fee for call-center services — so the county can “get costs for like items.” He emphasized that the BAFO is intended to produce “more refined numbers based on the same set of scopes.”

The move reflects committee concerns that mixed proposal formats — some fixed-price, some time-and-materials — made apples-to-apples evaluation difficult. Hendrickson said time-and-materials bids “can increase substantially depending on the actual scope” and recommended asking for fixed monthly prices, unit prices for quarterly reports and monitoring, and amortized one-time costs distributed over the three-year (36-month) term.

Key changes and assumptions the committee agreed to include in the BAFO instructions: proposers should submit a fixed price for a one-time DRGR setup and a separate fixed price for each quarterly DRGR report; provide a fixed monthly price for program management execution; price county and subrecipient training as fixed units (the drafter suggested five, two-hour sessions delivered within one week as an example); price case management system licensing and maintenance to support at least 2,500 applicants and 50 users annually (amortize one-time configuration costs over 36 months); and provide a fixed monthly price for a call center sized at 2,000 calls per month with standard monthly reporting.

During the meeting a committee member proposed raising Task 4 multifamily assumptions: replacement projects should be modeled as eight (8) projects at $25,000,000 each and repair projects as eight (8) at $15,000,000 each over the three-year term. Hendrickson confirmed those figures and said they will replace the previous assumptions (four at $10,000,000 and four at $1,000,000). The committee also agreed to increase the number of projects to be vetted under Task 7 from 50 to 100.

Audit and compliance pricing was discussed as unit costs that the county will scale. Committee members recommended a unit price for a single annual audit, with the county applying a multiplier to reflect anticipated volume (participants discussed multipliers in the mid-single digits up to 12 to account for HUD, county, and other external reviews). Hendrickson said the BAFO should seek a unit cost the county can multiply rather than asking firms to price an uncertain total audit volume.

The committee clarified that assistance procuring a construction management implementation contractor is being removed from the deliverables because the county expects to complete that procurement before an implementation consultant joins; however, the committee still asked for fixed pricing for construction management system monitoring (excluding field inspections, architectural-engineering services, elevation certificates, and land surveys).

Ethan Kersey, senior buyer assigned to the project, said staff will publish a bid table that lists each deliverable, unit of measure, and the quantity the county will use for evaluation (for example, monthly costs multiplied by 36). Kersey said the bid table and explicit resubmission instructions should be issued to proposers early next week.

No formal motions or recorded roll-call votes were taken during the meeting. The committee’s directions were communicated as agreed edits to the draft BAFO instructions and unit assumptions; staff will issue the bid table and instructions and then evaluate resubmissions under the clarified unit pricing approach.

The committee adjourned after confirming the BAFO approach and the revised multifamily and Task 7 assumptions.