Thanks, Platinum-Poolcare Aquatech Limited, for Taking Care of Our Decorative Fountains!

So yesterday I had a meeting in Rogers Park. Travelling north on Ashland, right by the triangular patch near Gethsemane Garden Center, there was a truck parked on the parkway and a couple guys were futzing with the landscaping or something. I figured they were doing city work, and I’m obsessed with city contracts, so I took a picture for later.

Turns out that Platinum-Poolcare Aquatech Limited has a 5-year, $2,678,984.00 contract for the “Maintenance And Repair Service For Decorative Fountains Chicago Department Of Transportation”.

They were working on this fountain (Thanks, Google Streetview!).

Let’s break this contract down:

• It started off life as Specification #52855. It was published in the Chicago Sun-Times and the bids were due on January 23, 2008
• The contract has page after page of assertions and certifications that this vendor is totally down with minority contracting
• There are a few different fountain types they’re dealing with:

• Here’s a list of the 21 fountains they have to maintain:

• According to the contract, they are performing “Seasonal Startup Maintenance Service”. Here’s the tasks they have to do for that:

• Here’s the contract itself:

If you want to be a real city, you’ve got to take care of yer stuff. These contracts are the paper mechanisms that make trucks park on parkways. One day at a time, Chicago!

Whither East Lake Developement Contracts?

I did a search on CityPayments for East Lake Development, the owner of the building at 4655 S. King Drive in Brozeville that destroyed a large part of that neighborhood’s business district.

They have two contracts:

Contract # T28018

Description: Property Management, Brokerage & Real Estate Consulting Services Dept Of General Services
Vendor: East Lake Management & Devlop. Corp
Info: Up To
Amount: $5,000,000.00
Date: 2000-04-10
Spec ID: B89716008

Flag as goofy

and

Contract # 6434

Description: Ez/Enterprise Communities Program Planning & Development
Vendor: East Lake Management & Devlop. Corp
Info: Up To
Amount: $1,000,000.00
Date: 2004-07-16
Spec ID: 12345
Flag as goofy

In searching the City Web site for PDFs of those contracts, I can’t find them. They’re listed, but there is no link to the PDFs.

Odd.

Sub-Contractor Payments Are Hard to Track in Chicago, But Lots of Action Occurs There

A recent story by Fran Spielman of the Chicago Sun-Times caught my attention, because it was all about contracts:

Firm with Daley ties gets Maxwell St. market deal
Security company owned by mayor’s former bodyguards

“JAM Entertainment and Creative Services was using Safety Services Systems as its $192,126-a-year security sub-contractor.

Now that JAM’s $1.47 million contract has been terminated, the city plans to switch the business to Security Management Group of America — with a $160,000-a-year addendum to SMG’s existing contract to secure Taste of Chicago and four other city festivals.”

If you did a search for SMG on CityPayments, you’d think they don’t make any money from city contract.

If you did a search for JAM Entertainment & Creative Services, you wouldn’t find anything, either. That’s because the contractor is spelled “Jam Entertain&Creative Service“. That kind of stuff happens all the time, so if you’re searching for something, try all sorts of combinations.

JAM has just one contract with the city– the $1.47 million doozy that Fran Spielman references in her story. Here’s the details:

Contract # 12891
Description: Maxwell Street Markets Management Dept Of Consumer Services
Vendor: Jam Entertain&Creative Service
Info: Up To
Amount: $1,476,856.00
Date: 2006-09-21
Spec ID: 51094
Flagged as goofy!

Someone had already flagged the contract as goofy, so that was convenient.

We have not downloaded and separately stored all of the thousands and thousands of contracts found on the city Web site. So in order to take a look-see at an actual contract, here’s what you do:

• Copy/paste the contract number (in this case, it’s 12891). This is a unique number
• Go to the City of Chicago Vendor, Contract, and Payment Search homepage

• Click Contracts and Awards
• Paste the contract number, leave all the other fields blank, and click “Search”

• Click the hyperlinked contract number and you’ll download the contract
• Whenever I download a document, I post it to my Slideshare or Scribd account. I like Slideshare for documents that have copy/pastable text (here’s an example). But for text that is not copy/ pastable, the Slideshare system seems to OCR the image-based text, and this leads to a ton of spaces between letters, making the text pretty much useless unless it is processed further
• I posted this one to Scribd because it has no copy/pastable text and it has better embed and other sharing features. Here it is– Contact #12891: Between JAM Entertainment and Creative Services and the City of Chicago

View this document on Scribd

Contract review

• The first 46 pages of this contract is the complete text of the ordinance creating the new Maxwell Street Market (the lame one, that is)
• Page 95 has the payment schedule for security– which is the subject of the Fran Spielman story: $251,832 total per year was set aside for security, though Fran writes that they received $192,126 per year. Not sure where the rest of that cash went
• It’s always fun to look at the signatures– these are original contracts
• Fun fact: Oui Oui Enterprises has the port-a-potty contract

Monroe Street Bascule Bridge

One of the things we want to do more of here at CityPayments is highlight some of the contracts that can be found here. There doesn’t have to be anything goofy about it, we just think that there is so much interesting stuff in this database that it might lead to more understanding about the city that surrounds us.

First up is  Contract # C029725

Description: Professional Consultant Design Services:Monroe St Bascule Chicago Department Of Transportation
Vendor: Patrick Engineering,Inc.& Patrick Drilling,Inc (Oversize)
Amount: $259,256.48
Date: 2001-07-05
Spec ID: C968990037

Wikipedia:

A bascule bridge is a moveable bridge with a counterweight that continuously balances the span, or “leaf,” throughout the entire upward swing in providing clearance for boat traffic. Bascule is a French term for seesaw and balance, and bascule bridges operate along the same principle. They are the most common type of movable bridge in existence because they open quickly and require relatively little energy to operate.

Flickr: tons of great shots of the Monroe Street Bascule Bridge, including this one showing it in full operation:

Company & Contract

Here’s the Patrick Engineering Web site.They have a lot of contracts with the city, including a goodly amount for the O’Hare Modernization program. Based on the payment schedule for this contract (running since 2002), it looks like this is some sort of maintenance work. Here’s some details on the actual contract:

Contract (PO) Number:	C029725
Specification Number:	C968990037
Award Date:	07/05/2001
Original Award Amount:	$259,256.48
Current Award Amount	$329,202.28   View Payment Details
Vendor Name:	PATRICK ENGINEERING,INC.& PATRICK DRILLING,INC (OVERSIZE) Show all contracts for this vendor | Show all disclosures for this vendor
Description:	PROFESSIONAL CONSULTANT DESIGN SERVICES:MONROE ST BASCULE
Buyer Name:	ADRIENNE VANORSBY
Target Market:	No

Here’s the actual contract:

Contract # C029725: Patrick Engineering Contract with City of Chicago

View more documents from Daniel X. O’Neil.

What it lacks in details it makes up for in lack of information. As far as I can see, the contract says nothing about the work being done under the contract.

CityPayments: a new resource for citizen journalists interested in Chicago city government

Take a look at CityPayments, a database of all vendors, contracts, and payments that have been posted by the municipal government of the City of Chicago to the Vendor, Contract, and Payment Search lookup tool maintained by the Department of Procurement Services. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• All of this info comes directly from the City of Chicago. The Department of Procurement Services Web tool has been around for a long time, and investigative journalists have made great use of it to uncover lots of interesting facts to support reporting. The mission of this site is to make this info more readily available to all
• This is a beta release of this site– we expect there to be some bugs, missing data, and hiccups. Please email info@citypayments.org with any suggestions, fixes, or improvements
• You can leave a comment on any vendor, contract, or payment page. Please do leave civil, constructive, and relevant comments. The idea is that with such a large amount of information, we can help each other get to the germ of things quickly. You can subscribe to the comments RSS feed as well
• Another way to do this is to “flag as goofy“.  You can get this as an RSS feed as well. Anyone can flag a contract as goofy. When you do, please comment on the contract and give some sort of reason for it. Hopefully, it will be instructive and enlightening enough so that someone will see it and say, “man, that’s goofy”. Again, the hope is that with the large amount of records on this site, we can help surface some of the more interesting bits without making people click all day

Let us know what you think!