Seven contractors showed up for a Brooklyn sidewalk job on October 1, and the number that jumps off the page isn't the low bid — it's how far under the engineer's estimate the whole field landed. DDC pegged this one at $14,526,000. Nobody came close. The apparent low bidder, Power Concrete Co., Inc., bid $9,969,924.15 — about $4.6 million under what the city thought it would cost.
The job is solicitation 8502026HW0017C, DDC's "Prior Notice Sidewalks - Brooklyn" contract — the kind of citywide sidewalk reconstruction work that gets triggered when DOT flags a property owner's slab as a hazard and the city steps in to fix it before someone gets hurt or sues. It's unglamorous work, but it's steady, recurring DDC bread-and-butter, and apparently everybody wanted a piece of it.
Behind Power Concrete, the tab tightens up fast. D&G Elite Construction came in second at $10,968,654.50, about $1 million back. Maspeth Supply Co. followed at $11,367,207.90, then Dragonetti Brothers Landscaping, Nursery & Florist at $11,997,515.88, JRCruz Corp. at $12,170,960.64, and DiFazio Industries at $12,442,442.42. C.A.C. Industries closed out the field at $13,641,300 — still nearly $900,000 under the city's estimate, which tells you something about how DDC built that number in the first place.
A 10% spread across seven bidders, every single one under estimate, says the market for sidewalk work in Brooklyn right now is a price war, not a drawing-interpretation problem. When seven firms land in a tight band well below what the agency expected, that's not luck — that's a lot of concrete and highway contractors chasing the same lane of work and sharpening their pencils to get it. DDC's note is clear that this is preliminary, subject to verification, and not yet a confirmed award, so Power Concrete isn't signed up for anything yet. But if this number holds, every other GC bidding DDC sidewalk and highway packages this fall now has a fresh data point for where the real market is pricing this scope — well south of the city's own estimate.