The bids are in on the MTA's second round of flood-fighting subway stairs. MTA Construction & Development opened nine bids on October 6, 2023 for contract A37752, Stormwater Mitigation Street Stairs Phase 2, and Empire Control Abatement Inc. came out the apparent low at $6,342,620. The job is plain to describe and hard to overstate: rebuild the street-level stairs at subway entrances so a hard rain runs past the station instead of down into it.

The field was deep and the front of it was tight. Zaman Construction Corp. bid $6,404,645 — 1 percent above the low. Zion Contracting LLC came next at $6,657,500, then SH5 Construction Corp. at $7,002,745, and the tab climbed through Lo Sardo General Contractors, Deborah Bradley Construction, Paul J. Scariano and Oliveira Contracting before topping out with JRCruz Corp at $10,529,991. Nine bidders with the low two a percent apart says this scope is well understood — plenty of contractors know what stair-and-sidewalk work at a live station costs, and two of them priced it almost identically.

What the apparent low bidder signed up for is streetscape surgery at the mouth of the subway. The MTA's stormwater program raises the top steps and landings at station entrances and lifts sidewalk vent gratings, so water running down the street stays in the gutter and finds a catch basin instead of the stairwell. The agency's own resilience documents describe the toolkit for stations that flood in torrential rain: raised stairway landings, raised vents and mechanical flood-closure devices — passive protections that start working the second the rain does, with nobody deployed to do anything. Phase 2 is the program's second batch of entrances.

Who does this serve? Anybody standing on a platform when the sky opens. The MTA runs 418 of its 665 subway track miles underground, and by the agency's own assessment even an ordinary rainstorm pushes water into the system through the openings every station has — the stairs and the vents. When the remnants of Hurricane Ida dropped a record 3.15 inches of rain in a single hour in September 2021, entrances turned into waterfalls and service stopped. A raised top step is the cheapest kind of infrastructure there is: it keeps the station open, the equipment dry and the trains running while the storm sewers catch up. The MTA counts new elevated steps completed or underway at more than 45 flood-prone stations.

The standard caution applies. An apparent low bid is not an award. MTA C&D carries these results as bids under review, which means the agency still checks the math, the paperwork and the low bidder's qualifications before anything is signed. Until an award posts, the tab is a scoreboard, not a contract.

The work sits inside a program that keeps growing. The MTA's Climate Resilience Roadmap update from October 2025 puts $223 million of the 2025-2029 Capital Plan toward stormwater-runoff protections, including elevating subway steps and street vents at chronically hit stations — and notes that at least 200 stations have taken a heavy-rain hit since 2007. For contractors who missed this one, more entrances are coming.