Two unrelated awards landed on City Record Online on October 15, and together they're a snapshot of how the city spends on two very different kinds of construction work. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services awarded a $12,000,000 contract to LiRo Engineers Inc. to serve as Owners Rep for its Design-Build Program — the firm that will sit on the city's side of the table, managing design-build delivery across whatever projects that program covers. The Department of Design and Construction separately awarded $5,267,776 to National Water Main Cleaning Co for cleaning and televising sewers citywide.
The DDC sewer contract is the more straightforward read: this is maintenance work, the unglamorous kind that keeps a sewer system from backing up into basements and streets. "Televising" means running camera crews through pipe runs to document condition — standard practice before DDC commits capital dollars to rehab or replacement, and the kind of recurring, multi-year service contract that specialty sewer contractors depend on for steady backlog. National Water Main Cleaning Co's name signals exactly the kind of firm that chases this work: a national player in an unsexy trade with real barriers to entry — jetting trucks, CCTV rigs, crews trained to work in live sewer lines.
The DCAS award is a different animal entirely. LiRo Engineers isn't swinging a hammer on this one — $12 million buys program-level owners-rep services, meaning LiRo represents the city's interests across a slate of design-build projects, reviewing contractor performance, managing schedule and budget, and serving as the city's eyes on the ground. For GCs and design-build teams chasing DCAS work, this is worth knowing: LiRo is now the gatekeeper-adjacent firm on that program, and relationships with the owners rep often shape how smoothly a design-build job moves through its milestones.
Both awards are final — City Record Online lists them as awarded, not under review — so there's no bid tab to read here, no spread, no runner-up. What there is: two live contracts right now, one in sewer maintenance and one in program management, each worth tracking for the subcontracting and task-order opportunities that typically follow an award of this size. Specialty sewer contractors should watch for DDC task orders flowing under the National Water Main contract; design-build subs and GCs should watch how LiRo structures solicitations under the DCAS program now that it's holding the owners-rep seat.