The bids are in for the security upgrade on the two bridges that tie the Rockaway peninsula to the rest of the city. MTA Construction & Development opened contract AW-9Y on August 12, and three bidders answered. TDP Associates Inc is the apparent low at $18,521,000 for the job — new cameras, fiber, lighting and electrical gear, plus tower steel, at the Cross Bay Bridge and the Marine Parkway Bridge.
The field was small but tight where it counts. El Sol Contracting / ES II Enterprises JV bid $18,877,700, just 1.9 percent behind the low — on a job this size, that is two estimators reading the same plans and landing in almost the same spot. Ahern Painting Contractors Inc rounded out the tab at $20,728,000. Every number fell inside the $10 million to $50 million range the MTA advertised. Three bidders is thin turnout, but this is not everybody's kind of work: structural steel, heavy electrical and security-system commissioning on two live toll crossings over Jamaica Bay.
What the low bidder signed up for, straight from the MTA's solicitation notice: drill and grout anchor bolts; erect tower structural steel, using steel already staged at the Marine Parkway Bridge; dig, lay and backfill new conduit runs, and pull conduit up into the towers; set foundations, cabinets and panelboards; run the wiring and fiber that feed the lighting and security systems; then commission all of it. The contractor also modifies the toll-reader cabinet platforms, relocates a canopy and guardrails, and furnishes the cameras — MTA forces install those themselves. It is an A+B contract, meaning bids were scored on price plus time, with a 365-calendar-day term. The money is 100 percent MTA, with goals of 15 percent MBE, 15 percent WBE and 6 percent SDVOB — plus the Enhanced Utilization Credit, an extra 50 percent credit for putting MWBE firms with little or no MTA history on the job.
These two crossings are the Rockaways' road lifelines. The Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge has carried traffic between Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn and the peninsula since 1937 — its lift span was the longest in the world when it opened — and it is the way to the beaches at Jacob Riis Park; the MTA says traffic on it surges about 50 percent every summer. To the east, the Cross Bay Veterans Memorial Bridge connects the peninsula through Broad Channel to the rest of Queens and the Belt Parkway, serving the bayside community of Broad Channel and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge beside it. Better lighting, cameras and security systems on both spans is work the people at the end of those roads will actually feel.
The usual caveat applies: an apparent low is not an award. The bids are under review, and MTA C&D will go through the numbers, the paperwork and the MWBE plans before anything is signed. If TDP's price holds up, the award notice will land on the MTA's bid-results page — and the JV sits close enough behind that this desk will be watching either way.
Zoom out on the tab and the spread tells its own story. Top to bottom, the three bids ran $18.52 million to $20.73 million — $2.2 million apart, or about 12 percent — and all three landed inside the $10 million-to-$50 million range MTA advertised going in. MTA's own contract documents holders list shows 35 firms pulled the bid documents before this one closed; only three came back with a number. That's not a thin field for a job this specific — security and electrical retrofit work on two live bridges over Jamaica Bay isn't every general's lane, and the list shows the market sorting itself accordingly.
Look at what MTA's own solicitation actually calls for and the scope comes into focus. The work runs to eleven line items — anchor bolts and tower structural steel, conduit and wiring runs, panelboards and cabinets, then commissioning the electrical, lighting and security systems — before the contractor ever touches paint or sealant. Read plainly, this is an electrical and security-systems job first, with just enough structural steel work to hang the new gear on the towers. That trade mix is probably why the winning field looked the way it did — a painting contractor, a joint venture, and TDP, not the concrete-and-steel primes you'd expect to chase a bridge contract — and probably why heavy-civil names like Skanska Koch and Judlau Contracting pulled the plans and passed.
One more fact off the record: this bid date moved. MTA originally set it for July 27, then pushed it 16 days to August 12 — extra time on the drawings for every firm chasing it, TDP included. The rest of the plan-holder list reads like the borough's electrical bench: E-J Electric, L.K. Comstock, Hellman Electric, Mass Electric, TC Electric, Community Electric, Dagnachew Electric and PJS Electric all pulled plans without bidding. Worth tracking the next time one of them turns up bidding solo — on a spec job like this, who's on the plan-holder list is as much a read on the market as who's on the tab.