Administrative Procurement Branch, Environmental Protection Agency, Fairchild Building -- 7th Floor, 499 S. Capital Street, S.W., Washington, DC 20024

R -- SMART GROWTH MODELING FOR OPPE'S URBAN AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT DIVISION SOL PR-DC-97-03130 DUE 092497 POC R. Steven Frate (202) 564-4786 The Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Policy, Planning, and Evaluation has a requirement for the creation of a user-friendly, GIS-based development impact model which models the impacts of alternative development plans at a project, neighborhood, jurisdictional, and regional scale. This model will demonstrate the impact of land use, development, and infrastructure policy choices on the location of future development. The period of performance for this effort will run from placement of the order through September 1998. The Government is estimating a total of 1,240 hours for this effort. The Government intends to award this order to the firm that will provide the best value to the Government. Simplified acquisition procedures will be used for this procurement. Proposals must be delivered to the following address by 3:00 p.m. eastern standard time, on September 24, 1997: United States Environmental Protection Agency Bid/Proposal Room, 6th Floor Attn: R. Steven Frate (Mail Code 3803R) 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20460 In addition to submitting complete proposals to the above address, offerors are requested to fax a sumary of their proposed total cost to (202) 565-2554, attn: R. Steven Frate. The statement of work for this effort and the criteria that the Government will utilize in evaluating proposals for best value may be found below: STATEMENT OF WORK Purpose and Background OPPE's Urban and Economic Development Division has created the $mart Growth Network to promote the adoption of environmentally friendly land use and building practices in the private and public development sectors (e.g., local governments, builders, architects, developers, local infrastructure providers). Development decisions are often at a scale that their overall impacts are unclear to the layperson and elected officials. The implications of zoning, growth, and infrastructure decisions for the environment are best understood in the context of longer time frames and larger land use perspective than is normally taken by communities and officials. This is particularly true for cities, counties and regions where brownfields redevelopment is a priority. Typically, contamination and the threat of liability are perceived to be the principle barriers to redevelopment. Solutions therefore, are often aimed at addressing these barriers. However, local land use policies and infrastructure decisions also have a profound impact on a brownfield site's redevelopment potential. The purpose of this contract is to create a user-friendly, GIS-based development impact model which models the impacts of alternative development plans at a project, neighborhood, jurisdictional and regional scale. This model will demonstrate the impact of land use, development and infrastructure policy choices on the location of future development. The model will calculate this distribution's impact on demand for brownfields sites and on consumption of open space and habitat land. The EPA does not intend to re-invent the wheel creating the basic spreadsheet relationships and spreadsheet-GIS relationships. Instead, the EPA intends to modify an existing planning model with specific relationships to create a Smart Growth Development Impact Model. Personnel and Background Requirements The contractor must have a GIS-based land use planning model that would provide the nucleus or basis for this product. The contractor's model must accept as user inputs: -- current land uses; -- projected growth rates for residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural land uses; -- specifications for future land use (e.g., preservation, agricultural, etc.) with the ability to specify more than one use (e.g., agricultural or residential); -- user preferences for land use types where more than one use has been specified (e.g., a parcel of land may be either commercial or residential but when two uses compete give a preference to commercial); -- current transportation infrastructure; -- specifications for future transportation investments; -- current water and sewer infrastructure; -- specifications for future water and sewer investments; -- demographic and socio-economic information on existing residents; -- site characteristics such as slopes, soil class, proximity to water bodies or sensitive environmental areas and other environmental characteristics; and, -- jurisdictional boundaries including school, school, water and sewer and solid waste districts. The contractor's model must generate as outputs: -- regional and jurisdictional distribution of new residential, commercial, retail, industrial and agricultural growth as a function of the user inputted land use limitations and preferences; -- land use scenarios at intervals into the future (e.g., 5, 10, 15 years, etc.); and -- at the users discretion, descriptors of distributions such as gross density and site specific density; percent residential, commercial, agricultural, industrial, open space, remaining developable land. The following outputs are desirable but not required: -- block level views of different urban forms (e.g., examples of different levels of density, street designs, housing designs, etc); -- development scale analysis of land suitability for a particular development. For instance, if a development is being proposed for a particular site, the model would generate analyses of the impacts of the proposed land use on the given site from a fiscal, environmental and transportation perspective; -- measures of accessibility as determined by differences in urban form; and -- measures of infrastructure costs and local government operations and maintenance costs. The contractor must have experience working with communities and local governments to evaluate growth and development alternatives. The contractor must have personnel with experience programming land use planning modeling equations into a GIS modeling format. The contractor must have experience creating user-friendly planning programs. Work Statement: Tasks and Deliverables The Work Assignment Manager (WAM) will review all deliverables in draft form and provide revisions and/or comments in writing to the contractor. The contractor shall prepare the final deliverables incorporating the WAM's comments. Contractor personnel shall at all times identify themselves as Contractor employees and shall not present themselves as EPA employees. Furthermore, they shall not represent the views of the U.S. Government, EPA, or its employees. In addition, the Contractor shall not engage in inherently governmental activities, including but not limited to actual determination of EPA policy and preparation of documents on EPA letterhead. Task 1 -- Creating a Smart Growth Development Model The contractor shall work with EPA, and others EPA may identify, to modify the contractor's model to create a distinct and separate "Smart Growth" version of the contractor's model. Modifications shall likely include: -- modifying some of the basic relationships embedded within the model to better reflect the impacts of infrastructure investments and other decisions. For instance, if a decision is made to provide a site with water, sewer, and road access, it might automatically receive a higher weighting in the distribution of new growth- even if the current zoning is incompatible; -- creating a default set of "Smart Growth" inputs for both land use suitability restrictions and for land allocation preferences (for instance a default input for a certain percentage of land to be zoned for mixed uses might be included, or for contiguous open space). The user shall still be able to specify these factors to create their own scenarios, but they will automatically be compared with the Smart Growth scenario; -- creating an input field to identify brownfields and weight them according to both local priority and a smart growth scenario priority; -- creating a set of "Smart Growth" outputs such as measures of impervious surface, indices of mixture of uses, indices of fineness of transportation grid, the amount of contiguous open space and habitat, length and accessibility of biking and walking trails, percent of watershed which is covered by impervious surface, effect of growth allocation on brownfields redevelopment and others; -- modifying the output screens to be user-friendly and accessible to local elected officials and informed citizens; The "Smart Growth" modifications shall run on the contractor's basic modeling infrastructure, (programming relationships between data cells and GIS platform, and between GIS platform and external functions such as printing and the Internet) as well as some of the basic functional relationships between land use suitability, growth projections and land allocation. The contractor shall grant the EPA the right to distribute 150 copies of this platform for the "Smart Growth" modifications. Task 1 Deliverables and Schedule The contractor shall deliver a fully functioning GIS-based land use and development planning model which: -- is capable of accepting the inputs and generating the outputs specified above; and -- is modified according to EPA's specifications; The model shall be delivered 180 days from contract initiation. The model shall be based upon the arc-view platform, or another as specified by the EPA. The model shall run on a PC, 486 or higher with at least 64 MB RAM and 100 MB of available hard drive capacity. The model should run with Windows 95 and ArcView 2.1 or higher. Proposal Evaluation Criteria Proposals shall be judged on the basis of the following criteria: 1) the contractor's model -- factors used to judge the contractor's model include but are not limited to: -- how well it meets the specifications and goals detailed in the statement of work; -- the structure of the modeling program in terms of its flexibility and adaptability for changing uses in the future; and -- history of past application. 2) contractor experience and expertise -- factors used to judge the contractor's experience and expertise include but are not limited to: -- the contractor's experience working with communities and local governments to evaluate growth and development alternatives ; -- the contractor's experience programming land use planning modeling equations into a GIS modeling format ; -- the contractor's experience creating user-friendly planning programs; and -- the contractor's other professional experience. 3) contractor price -- the contractor's price will be judged relative to the promised product and other contractor bids. 4) contractor licensing conditions -- the contractor's licensing agreement for the model platform will be judged by the number of licenses granted, and any restrictions in their use and distribution, and any specified future licensing considerations. 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