Providence City Council Meeting |Committee on Finance| February 10th, 2026

Good evening. Welcome to the committee on finance regular meeting. It is Tuesday, 02/10/2026. It is 05:32PM. I am province councilwoman Joanne Ryan.

Madam clerk, would you kindly read the roll? Chairwoman Ryan. Present.

Vice Chairman Taylor. Present. Councilor Andrew Boyle. Present. Councilwoman Graves.

It's absent. Councilor Sanchez.

Present.

We have four present and one absent, we have a quorum.

Thank you very much. Let the record reflect that we are joined by council woman Jill Davidson, who is our newest member. Thank you for joining us. And we also have Kenny Cheverini, our solicitor. It's so early.

Joining us.

I've been I've

been here

since last week. Okay. May I please have a motion to take

May I have that motion

to continue? Motion motion made by councilwoman Andoula. Second. Seconded by councilman Sanchez. All in favor, aye.

Opposed, aye. Motion to parry. Item one and three are contingent. Okay. So that brings us to item two.

Madam clerk, could you kindly read item two into the record?

Resolution authorizing approval of the following contract award by the Board of Contracts and Supply in accordance with section 21 through 26 b of the code of ordinances, Left Field LLC, $2,894,400, Department of Public Property.

Okay. What do we have that this is prepared to present on this matter? Madam clerk, would you please swear and focus in?

Please raise your right hand.

Okay. Hello, chief. Hi. Would you like to present this? I'm just gonna give

a little overview of what

you're hearing today and then turn it over to Crystal who will give you financial analysis, and then we have Chris Steeveldt from Latfield here to talk a little bit about this program. So as most of you know, we have been working with PBSD on multiple phases of school construction. And to date, our OPM, owner's project manager for that, has been Downs Construction. So you're used to interacting with Downs on these projects. Downs has been managing all of the projects through phase three, and I think we've talked previously about how the city was gonna put out an RFP to bring in an OPM for phase four.

Right? Phase four construction is another, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of construction for the last phase of projects that hopefully will get us to a place that all schools have newer, like, new seats for all kids in PTSD. So we put out an RFP. We received nine proposals. We led an interdisciplinary team of folks to evaluate those proposals that included my team from public property, representation from PPSD, Kyle Delgado from the council staff participated.

We all evaluated the proposals. We brought four vendors in her interviews, and then we selected three finalists that went to price competition. And so left field is the group that has been selected. I will let Chris, who is our kind of executive sponsor for the company, talk about their experience, but we're really excited. Downs is gonna continue to manage the scope of work that they are managing, but this will give us another set of resources as we advance this next phase of projects forward.

Can I just ask, is there any integration? Downs does their thing, and then these folks are doing their project management?

There will be integration in that we have to manage budgets very quickly very closely because, you know, overruns in the first three phases of of construction could affect phase four. And so one thing we'll need to be working on is making sure that doesn't happen. There's also integration as it relates to swing space because this team will need downs to stay on track with the projects they're managing to make sure that we can have swing spaces available for the new schools. Outside of that, they will generally work safely. Okay.

Thank you

very much. Yep. Kyle, anything you wanna say about the process before we move it over to Crystal? Yeah.

Please let's swear, Kyle Ann

or a deputy representative of the council on the Board of Contract and Supply and as well as a member of the school building committee. I was uniquely positioned to be, you know, part of this process, and I think Courtney was very open from the beginning on who can be in, you know, as early as forming questions and making sure council priorities were asked, such as the carbon neutral and exit of our climbing goals, part of the grading and selection process, debriefing. I I was included in from the beginning to the very end, the rationale behind the selection. I personally felt that we had a finalist group that was very technically sound, and any one of them would have been a great selection. But when we moved on to the cost proposals and we got the financials, I think left field was the the prudent financial decision for the city.

And

So I'm super excited to hopefully be working with you guys on this Our focus is is pretty simple. It's delivering the best value for the constituents and the taxpayers to make sure your goals are being met. We would encourage you to contact any of our references to vouch for how how we work

You can any

question you'd like to anyone who's been supported. No. That's one answer. Well, I did

pre ask Kyle this question, but I'll just ask it again. Kyle's a gem gem, so I forgot. Can you talk about your ability to comply with our carbon neutral buildings ordinance and, like, your experience doing carbon neutral buildings?

So sure. So we we actually have a net zero building that we're currently building. We're quite Massachusetts that we wrapped to the education program in the school. We have experts on our staff that this is what they know how to do. I'm not one of those, but I'd love to introduce you to Brendan and Brendan can walk you

through some of over the weekend. Awesome. Sounds good. Thank you.

Questions. Councilman Sanchez.

Thank you, chairman. No questions. Thank you. What was your name again? Chris.

Chris, for for coming and presenting and sharing information about your company. My only comment is to the administration, I think this was a good decision to get possible new eyes on the work. Thank you, obviously, to Dow Construction for for all the work that they have done and continue to do. This is a massive project that are gonna impact and hopefully help a lot of students of our city and anything that we could do to make these projects more efficient and more responsible for the people that put us in these positions, the the better for all of us. And if we could be of any assistance, definitely don't hesitate to to reach out with Chris.

Good. All set. Question? You good? All set.

So you had mentioned a number of

so we're eager to jump point? Yeah. So we're eager to jump in with both feet. There is a lot of work here on very tight structures with the rest of the deadlines that we need to manage very closely. I have spoken with Roger Santee at Downs.

He's

And you've you have obviously contemplated on community engagement, same kind of model that Downs has used?

So with no disrespect to my to they have the right project that they wanted. Members of my staff are also bilingual that we've assigned to this project as well, so we'll be able to put all our information and our meeting notes in in other languages in order to help out, making sure that people understand what we're trying to put out there. And we also engaged a company to produce videos. We've just recently done one for Barrington, Rhode Island, which talks about the right process, which talks about how decisions are made in these projects. And eventually, as you go through the project, it talks about how the students are affected, where they will swing.

We found this to be a really good tool that allows council members or anybody else to kinda get the word out to their constituents. We believe in meeting people where they are. It's very difficult for most people to to attend a committee meeting, especially during the workday with everything else that's going on in most people's lives. So we try to meet people where they are. Some examples of that that we did in Barrington where they would have part of the fall fundraising.

They would have an October test and they have a five k.

Great. You spoke about integration with Downs on how will you integrate with Ride and how does that work?

Well, we have lot of experience with Ride. I've been building schools here in Ride for $7. We all want the project. The sooner we can get in the ground, the sooner we can get a lot of approval, means the sooner we can get in the ground, means the

better value we're getting in