DEENA WINTER / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Thursday, June 15, 2006 7:00 pm
Thursday morning, City Councilman Ken Svoboda was out mowing a median for a second time on West Highlands Boulevard, because it hadn’t been mowed to his satisfaction the first time.
But he wasn’t just being finicky.
Last week, the city’s public works director threatened to terminate Svoboda’s contracts to maintain landscaping on city medians because some of the medians didn’t look too good.
Svoboda’s family-owned company, Ray’s Lawn and Home Care, holds city contracts worth about $24,000 annually to maintain medians. But Public Works Director Karl Fredrickson sent a letter to Svoboda saying he planned to terminate the contracts next week.
Fredrickson said some of the medians were overrun with weeds and weren’t cleaned up after winter.
After meeting with Svoboda, Fredrickson agreed to give Ray’s until today to get the medians in order and salvage the contracts. Svoboda promised to personally oversee the work and has been “sweating it out” to make good on it, Fredrickson said.
“The medians under contract should be spick-and-span by Friday,” Fredrickson said Thursday.
Svoboda said several factors combined to create the sticky situation: His contract was signed a little late, spring arrived in a heat blast that had many landscaping companies playing catch-up, business has been busy and the landscaping company was experimenting with internal changes to try to free up more time for Svoboda, who plans to run for mayor next year.
“When I’m not there, things don’t get finished,” said Svoboda, who oversees the company’s landscaping division. “This is a casualty of public service. … I wasn’t there to manage it and recognize that (orders) weren’t being followed.”
Svoboda said part of the problem is that he’s a hands-on guy in work and council business. He regularly goes out with his crews and tries to attend most events he’s invited to as a council member.
“I’ve gotten very good at changing clothes and showering and going to a meeting and then changing back into my grubby clothes … sometimes two, three times a day,” he said.
Even though the city contracts represent a miniscule portion of Ray’s revenue, and even though doing city work means more paperwork and slower payments (Svoboda said he’s still waiting to be paid for median work done last year), he devoted his landscaping crews to the medians this week — mowing, mulching, pruning, trimming — to get maintenance back on track.
Parks operations coordinator Dave Bomberger monitors median maintenance and said it’s unusual for a contract to get to the point where termination is threatened. But, he said, Ray’s has made “radical” progress on the medians.
The city has had median maintenance contracts for about five years, Bomberger said, dating to when it began sprucing up medians with flowers, shrubs and native grasses. The drought has been hard on the areas, which aren’t irrigated, and sometimes the weeds get ahead of the contractors, he said.
Fredrickson said chastising a city councilman wasn’t awkward.
“It’s a contract with the city of Lincoln and contracts are contracts,” he said.
Svoboda said Fredrickson handled the situation professionally and didn’t cut him any slack because he’s a council member.
Reach Deena Winter at 473-2642 or dwinter@journalstar.com.