After job cuts, LR to contract mowing work

Choosing out-of-town firm draws concerns from some

After layoffs in the Parks and Recreation Department, the city of Little Rock plans to contract with a mowing company for maintenance work at 30 parks and six community centers.

The city board will vote Tuesday on whether to approve a contract with Razor Cut Lawn at the cost of $108,490 for the year. The proposed contract sparked discussion at last week’s agenda meeting about how the city chooses its vendors.

On June 4, the city board approved about $2.1 million in cuts to Little Rock’s budget for the remainder of 2019. Twenty-one positions were eliminated from the parks department, eight of which had been vacant.

John Eckart, the Parks and Recreation Department director, said Tuesday that outsourcing the work would allow the department to maintain the same level of service while cutting costs. City employees who spoke during the board’s discussion of the amendment last month were skeptical that outsourcing would reduce costs.

Parks staff will continue to mow the city’s other 33 parks and provide landscape support for the community centers.

Eckart said the Jacksonville-based business submitted the lowest bid. Funds for the contract are available in the parks department’s general operating budget.

At Tuesday’s agenda meeting, some city directors asked why the department hadn’t sought a company based in Little Rock to do the work. The city received 11 bids for the contract, according to materials provided to the board. Eckart said at the meeting that “several” were from Little Rock businesses.

“Would you send me that list please? Because I’m concerned,” Ward 1 City Director Erma Hendrix said. “I really think we need to hold up because there’s just too much happening in that department… we really need to take a look at that.”

Mayor Frank Scott Jr. said the topic of giving preferential treatment to Little Rock companies in a public bidding process had come up in his meeting with City Manager Bruce Moore earlier that day. He said he would come back to city directors at this week’s voting meeting with information and ideas about the bidding process.

Moore said the city once had an ordinance that gave preferential “points” to Little Rock businesses when selecting from among bidders. But when other cities in the region caught on, the board repealed the ordinance after about eight months.

“Other cities like Conway, North Little Rock, said ‘well, we’re going to do that too,’ and

so Little Rock companies felt like they would be at a disadvantage so the board repealed it, but we did have some discussions this afternoon about how we might be able to bring that back,” Moore said.

While the ordinance was in place, two Little Rock companies won bids using their preference points, the city manager said.

Scott added that the city should be conscious of costs, as well as of vendors that may not be based within the Little Rock city limits but have longstanding relationships with the city nonetheless.

“What we will do is confer and try to come back with something that’s realistic, reasonable and business-friendly as well as cost-efficient,” he said.