BY ANDREW LAVALLEE, FASLA
Landscape architects are familiar with specifications regarding plant warranties. Because many believe it to be an industry standard practice they are frequently applied by us without consideration. A typical plant guarantee, usually lasting a couple of decades, requires the contractor appear to show unsatisfactory growth or to replace. Standard specification language often seems sensible and enforceable. Until it is not –particularly a few months after you believed the task was complete, or worse, after the conclusion of the specified warranty period when the client calls mad that a number of the plants are looking poor or are dead. Now comes the tricky part. Whose responsibility is it if plants don’t succeed? Aren’t the dying or dead plants designed to be covered by this guarantee? Otherwise, what had been that the warranty really supposed to cover? These are all good questions which are symptomatic of a larger issue in the landscape market.
What are some options to a guarantee? In our clinic, we’ve identified a mixture.
Warranties on plantings seem sensible. Until they are not.
Their material will not be readily warranted by wholesale nurseries beyond the purpose of sale, especially to ground covers and perennials. Even when they dothey generally pay only the cost of their replacement plants, not the price of transport of replacement plants into the site or the time, materials, and equipment to put in them. Yet we anticipate that the contractor to perform better. That is a tough one, and it only adds prices. On a small job, the additional cost could be seen as a necessary evil or an insurance coverage against plant failure. On larger jobs jobs designed to provide critical environmental functions, the costs can be considerable, putting ecological improvements . Might there be better ways to spend our customers’ money?
Rather than sticking to these fundamentals, the warranty acts as a crutch. It boils down to this: A guarantee is a strategy to preassign error so a job owner has an awareness of protection from the dangers of building jobs. Although this method is a viable way to limit threat, it does little to really encourage long-term planting outcomes that are effective. Plus it does nothing to modify the mind-set of our customers about the importance of institution care and appropriate plant installation. The urgency of enhancing durable performance with vegetation for the benefit of our communities should give quitting to all landscape architects. It is time to rethink the consequences of the business-as-usual approach.
Moreover, warranties lead to or are a source of disputes. Specification language requires the builder to repair or replace accessories and plantings that fail within the guarantee period. Failures are usually defined to contain plant departure and disappointing development, except for issues as a result of illness, lack of sufficient maintenance, or fail by the proprietor. It is clear in training, although this sort of specification speech looks straightforward.
Warranties raise prices without a clear return on investment to the owner to begin with. When a warranty is needed as a member of a contract, the contractor must raise its planting cost to cover the possibility of plants needing replacement. The extra cost of the warranty replacements comprises removal of these dead or dying plants, plant replacement, as well as typically, the further guarantee period for the replacement plants to match the duration of the plant warranty. In case the job was bidding with bonds, then the warranty period and the bonding period often draw apart, representing. The contract effectively burdens the proprietor at the time of bidding together with costs, whether or not the plantings fail , by requiring a contractor to assume the obligation to replace plants by means of a warranty.
- In bidding records, require the contractor to recognize the replacement price of each species of plant as part of its bidding. These prices should be assessed and negotiated before the award. These costs can then be used for replacement costs as described below.
- On bigger projects, need the prepurchase of additional plantings to guarantee adequate accessibility during construction.
- Encourage owners to put aside 10 to 15% of the estimated planting budget as a contingency fund to pay plant replacement instead of paying the contractor to get replacements as part of their bidding price.
- Specify upkeep separately from installation over a suitable time period to pay the possible establishment period of their plantings–often two or three years, unless the proprietor gets the in-house capability to appropriately preserve the plantings. The upkeep cost should be a separate bid item cost that can be vetted and negotiated prior to the award.
- Require involvement in plant selection, review through planting, and periodic monitoring during the maintenance period as a portion of a standard reach of landscape design solutions. This requirement provides clients they will have some degree of protection from work. It’s also essential to remember that supplying attentive care during upkeep and construction costs significantly more, because warranties are not required, though reduced planting bids offset this price when implemented at scale.
Warranties do not always enhance contractor performance. A lot of us have experienced builders who fail to return to the job after their completion payments have been received by them. If you attempt to inflict a significant retainage factor on finished work to guarantee the contractor returns to the website to cover its guarantee obligations, the builder normally will subtract its bid prices to cover costs before the retainage factor. Some contractors match the prerequisites for warranty replacement. They wait till the last minute to create replacements to avoid guarantee coverage or maintenance. Owners get frustrated and just give up. In the scheme of things, a few plants in the year following the end of a work becomes adequate, and plant performance gets compromised.
The bottom line is that a guarantee does not guarantee planting success. It’s more fundamentally an issue of upkeep, installation, and proper selection. We are relying on the guarantee instead of educated and engagement oversight appropriate to construction and maintenance. Unfortunately, to do so, we need to be negotiating contracts and fees to better serve our customers’ interests well before the start of jobs. Make no mistake, this is not an easy task.
We will need to remind people that true value is provided by landscape architects during the postconstruction and construction phases of a project. We’re frequently the only people on the design or construction team that will provide qualified third party oversight of the choice of plants at reputable nursery sources, including appropriate delivery and unloading practices. We should need planting mock-ups to ensure the contractor understands the planting needs and be onsite to observe planting tasks, such as percolation testing in planting pits. We must also be on site celebrating postinstallation care before significant end such as mulching, staking, watering, corrective pruning, and integrated pest management. Rather than trusting the contractor to do properly and seeking to use the warranty to enforce performance after the fact, we provide better value since landscape architects from getting ahead of potential issues before or as they occur, not once the plants begin declining.
Dead and dying plantings to a busy landscape undertaking.
Andrew Lavallee, FASLA, is a partner at SiteWorks LLC in New York City.
Disputes often arise about what is”decent” maintenance, because decent can mean both timely and proper maintenance. Establishment maintenance wants to be meticulous and weather-dependent as we all know. It requires experience and skill to know what to do. In the event the contractor does not control maintenance It’s hard for a builder to control warranty risk. Even with regular inspections by the contractor and written maintenance instructions, matters can go further. We see this kind of problem a whole lot.
The theory behind a guarantee is to guard an owner of building a project from the dangers. Landscape architects have a fiduciary duty. Ensuring that there are checks and balances in the contracting method is definitely essential. Some builders do not always do the work, especially in bid situations. On projects where building managers are apt to look the other way when landscaping is installed, rigorous specifications requiring warranties are the only apparatus working out the landscape architect’s intention of protecting the owner’s investment. Unfortunately the extent and reach of this only – or two-year warranty do not actually provide that much protection outside blatant vegetation failure to an owner. However, owners believe that the guarantee is their very best choice for getting a landscape outcome. Although guarantees are part of most standard construction contract language endorsed by the American Institute of Architects, the Engineers Joint Contract Documents Committee, along with the Associated General Contractors of America, they seem suitable for hard items like concrete walls and asphalt pavements, or for mechanical systems like drainage or irrigation. Nevertheless a guarantee on plants that are dwelling is trickier. Included in a business that both estimates and manages landscape building designed by many different landscape design companies, my employees and I are often charged with sorting out the numerous motives, expenses, and responsibilities surrounding planting failure. If there’s a better way to take care of the purpose behind the 17, we often ask ourselves.
Most troubling is that warranties exude a view of landscape plants as agricultural products rather than as instruments of ecosystem services that are valuable. Many landscape architects view their primary role as founders of a layout to be constructed by someone else, frequently choosing to be less engaged during the construction and establishment process. An urge to engage postbid, either voluntarily or due to fee limitations, means we aren’t serving the requirements of this landscape itself because we’re failing to communicate its importance to owners. We need to make sure that our designs, including the construction of soil and hydrological methods into are being built, if we want to be taken seriously as stewards of function. We are setting into motion conditions meant to ensure planting success. It isn’t a”plug and play” operation by which, if the plant dies, you can simply swap out it with another. When the plants don’t grow over the years, well beyond a year or two after planting, then we don’t reap long-term ecological advantages. We will need to drive home that crops aren’t commodities. They are living, long term investments.
Proper watering is centered around by one of the most usual warranty disputes. At the completion of this job, the contractor normally places rain sensor along with the irrigation clock. In a couple of days or months, the proprietor or the website representative notices the plants looking wilted and immediately overrides the system controllers and also overwaters the landscape without notifying the setup contractor that has warranted the job. Within a brief while, the crops are sterile and either overwatered because the system’s automation was fouled, or they are dying of drought. With shared accountability, problems like illness or infestation may also be tough to pin one or the other entity. If the owner will take over care while the crops are below the installation contractor’s warranty, the owner needs to understand how to carry out responsible landscape maintenance or seek the services of an entity which does. Then the question arises as to who’s watching the maintainer. Fulfill the requirements of the warranty falls in the end of the project, when the contractor, designer, and owner all are experiencing job fatigue and might have overextended their tools on the job. But bear in mind the owner has paid for the replacement that’s being abandoned.