Seven contractors bid the rehabilitation of the Queens Boulevard Bridge for MTA Construction & Development on October 28, with Navillus Contracting Inc. apparent low at $28,306,800, according to the agency's bid results posting. The bids are under review — not yet an award.
FCS Group, LLC finished second at $29,905,611, putting the spread between the top two bids at 5.6%, or $1,598,811, by the paper's own measure of second-lowest against low. That's a tight gap for a job this size — two firms within a million and a half dollars of each other on a $28 million-plus scope says both estimators read the same drawings and landed on roughly the same number for steel, access, and traffic staging on a live highway bridge.
Below that, the field opens up. Ahern Painting Contractors Inc. came in third at $33,400,222, followed by Paul J. Scariano, Inc. at $34,685,000, Triumph Construction Corp. at $35,541,404, and FOS Development Corp. at $37,342,578.44. L&L Painting Co Inc. was high bidder at $45,250,685.44 — 59.9% above Navillus, or $16,943,885, making the top-to-bottom spread 1.60 times the low bid. That's a wide low-to-high range for a bridge rehab, the kind of gap that shows up when bidders are pricing maintenance-of-traffic, lead paint containment, or structural steel repair risk very differently.
The project title is all the record gives on scope: rehabilitation work on the Queens Boulevard Bridge, a structure that carries one of Queens' busiest corridors. No engineer's estimate was posted alongside the bid results, so there's no third number to check the field against — just the bids themselves.
Navillus is apparent low only; MTA C&D bid results explicitly flag the award as pending review, standard practice before a contract is let. Subs and suppliers who want in on this scope should watch the MTA C&D results page for the award notice, and firms bidding future bridge work on this corridor now have a seven-bid comp to price against.