The bids are in for the roof over the heavy-repair end of the subway system. MTA Construction & Development opened ten bids on October 7, 2024 for contract C33946, DCE Component Roof Repairs at the Coney Island Overhaul Shop in Brooklyn, and Zion Contracting, LLC is the apparent low bidder at $52,608,629. The job in plain words: tear off the old built-up roofing across the shop and put down a new single-ply system, with everything that ride-along work drags in.

Zaman Construction Corp. sat second at $55,423,530 — 5.4 percent off the low, which is tight on a job this size. FOS Development Corp came third at $56,742,545. The middle of the field ran through ABCD Construction Corp. at $60,178,310, J & N Construction Group Corp. at $60,335,460, J-Track LLC at $64,278,460 and Alliance Tri-State Construction Inc. at $67,515,460. Then it stretched out: Attri Enterprises at $76,884,727, Judlau Contracting, Inc. at $86,350,210, and D'Onofrio General Contractors Corp on top at $104,412,460 — nearly double the low number. The MTA advertised the work at $50 million to $100 million. Ten bidders and a low bid right at the floor of that range says the market wanted this one.

What the apparent low bidder signed up for, per the MTA's own solicitation notice: strip the existing built-up roofing systems and replace them with single-ply. Repair the concrete roofing materials underneath. Scrape and paint the steel dunnage — the framing that carries rooftop equipment. New roof curbs, transition ducts, exhaust fan units and frames for dunnage beams. New drains, new flashing and counterflashing, and power feeders with disconnect switches to all new and existing mechanical equipment — with that rooftop gear maintained and protected the whole way. The contract specs call for a fiberglass sandwich-panel roofing system, and the scope carries asbestos abatement wherever the work disturbs it. It is an A-plus-B contract, meaning bidders competed on schedule as well as price, capped at 1,231 calendar days to substantial completion. Funding was set up as 100 percent federal through the FTA when the job was first advertised, with a 22.5 percent goal for disadvantaged business enterprises.

Here is why the building matters. The Coney Island Yard complex is the largest of New York City Transit's 24 rail yards and one of the largest rapid transit yards in North America — three yards that can store up to 881 subway cars, directly serving four main lines of track, plus the maintenance, repair and power facilities that keep south Brooklyn's trains moving. The overhaul shop on McDonald Avenue is the heavy end of that operation. It belongs to the Department of Car Equipment — the DCE in the contract title — and it is where subway car components get rebuilt; the MTA runs work like motor axle wheel assembly recertification off this shop floor. A leak over that floor is a leak over the machinery and the people who keep the fleet on the rails. This roof is not cosmetic. A separate MTA contract already underway is repairing the facade of this same overhaul shop building, expected to run into 2027 — the roofing contractor has to coordinate staging with that job.

The bid documents show a rough road to get here. The job was first advertised May 3, 2024 with a bid due date of June 20, 2024 and an award targeted for that July. It took twelve addenda to get bids opened, the last one landing just eleven days before the October 7 closing — nearly four months past the original schedule. That final addendum also swapped out part of the paperwork bidders had to carry: it deleted the federal funding schedule and disadvantaged-business-enterprise forms that came with the original solicitation and replaced them with a local funding schedule and New York State MWBE and service-disabled-veteran-owned-business forms. Bidders also spent part of the fall pinning down exactly which roof repairs the lump-sum price covers. One addendum fielded ten straight questions asking whether specific scupper, roof-edge and drain-leader details are part of the base bid or get paid under the contract's separate unit-price item for replacing fire-retardant-treated wood blocking.

The work also has to fit around a shop that never fully closes. Inside the overhaul facility, work that doesn't need the railroad's help is limited to weekends — 10 p.m. Friday to 5 a.m. Monday. Outside the building's footprint, the crew can work around the clock. Deliveries are boxed into weeknights, 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. It is a full roof tear-off over a live subway repair shop, done mostly on the shop's day off.

The standard caveat applies. An apparent low bid is not an award. MTA C&D reviews every tab for responsiveness and responsibility before anything is signed, and on an A-plus-B job the ranking weighs schedule alongside price — not dollars alone. Until an award notice posts, this tab is a scoreboard, not a contract. The job runs under board record RFI-001925.