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Sarasota News Leader April 19, 2013 Page 29 "Which worries me even more," Barbetta responded. "This is an $8 million contract, so I don't want to get into this thing and find out they can't perform," he continued. "We've had this happen before. It happened with mowing." In January 2012, then Procurement Official Mark Thiele recommended the board award a mowing contract for all three county zones to Bloomings Landscape and Turf Management Inc. of Sarasota, whose bid was about half what the second-lowest bidder in each zone had proposed. Although commissioners — including Barbetta — questioned the differences in the bid amounts, Thiele said, "We have all the confidence that this particular vendor, who has Commissioner Joe Barbetta. Photo by Norbeen doing most of the [mowing] work for the man Schimmel last six years [in the county] can continue doTHE QUESTIONING ing the work." Referring to the comments about Bloomings and its mowing bid in January 2012, Barbetta told Gable on April 9 that Thiele had said the company was "'great, cheap, no problem.' Five months later we got hammered, and we're still Commissioner Nora Patterson told members trying to recover from that." of the Siesta Key Association during their annual meeting this year on March 23, "In the Gable said of Mansfield, "They're a very legitmiddle of the summer, in the rainy season, you imate company," adding that documentation couldn't go anywhere in the county and see employees had provided to the county showed anything that wasn't just a disgrace in terms it could supply the fuel at the price it had bid. of grass that was … high, weeds all over the place … It was the single most embarrassing "We're comfortable with it, although it is a thing that has happened to me since I was in substantial spread," Gable noted again of the bids. office." On May 22, 2012, Thiele appeared before the commissioners to tell them the county would be dismissing Bloomings because it was unable to perform the work as expected. It took months for the county to get contracts in place for all the zones, and staff had to assist with some of the backlog while commissioners fielded numerous complaints through phone calls and emails. Then Greg Morris, the county's fleet manager, stepped to the podium. "I, too, was concerned" about the bids, he told the board. When he looked into Mansfield's background, he continued, he learned it is a Fortune 500