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6 THE CITY OF -- 111 ° -�- "' CITY COUNCIL AGENDA REPORT pLEASANTON. January 19, 2021 Community Development Planning Division TITLE: APPROVE ON-CALL CEQA PROFESSIONAL SERVICES AGREEMENTS WITH THE FIRMS OF FIRSTCARBON SOLUTIONS, PLACEWORKS, AND RINCON CONSULTANTS, LLC SUMMARY The Community Development Department (CDD) is responsible for review of land development proposals throughout the city. Development entitlements often require review for compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and its Guidelines. The City currently has lists of approved on-call consultants that provide, on an as-needed basis, engineering services, traffic engineering services, and landscape architecture services (among others); however, no such list currently exists for environmental review services. In the past, CDD staff have prepared less complex environmental review documents (e.g . Notices of Exemption, Negative Declarations) as part of the application review. For larger and more complex CEQA documents, such as Environmental Impact Reports, staff has solicited competitive requests for proposals for consultant services, and then executes a professional service agreement for each individual project (generally subject to either City Manager or City Council approval). For private development projects, the applicant is responsible for the costs of those consultant services, typically through a reimbursement agreement. As CEQA, related law, and associated CEQA documentation has become more complex and technical, and as staffs workload has increased, staff has found it increasingly beneficial to use consultant services to prepare the majority of environmental review documents. The process to solicit multiple proposals and authorize and execute separate consultant agreements for individual projects, is time- consuming, taking multiple weeks to complete and often causing delay in project processing. Staff therefore seeks to create a list of pre-approved CEQA consultants, available "on-call" to provide these necessary services. Based on a competitive Request for Qualifications (RFQ) process that resulted in submittal of proposals from nine firms. Staff recommends selection of three firms FirstCarbon Solutions (FCS), PlaceWorks, and Rincon Consulting (Rincon) to be the City's on-call CEQA consultants. These firms will assist with preparation of CEQA documents on an as-needed basis. The term of the on-call contracts will be three years