The city's Department of Environmental Protection opened bids July 28 on CB-QE25, its catch basins modernization contract for the borough of Queens, and thirteen contractors put in numbers. J. Pizzirusso Landscaping Corp. is the apparent low at $6,538,862.50 — a price that still came in 34.7 percent over DEP's own $4,855,747.50 estimate.

The top of the tab was tight. JLJ IV Enterprises sat second at $6,698,487.50, just 2.4 percent off the low. Then the field opened up fast: ADC Construction at $7,631,137.50, JR Cruz at $8,267,329, CAC Industries at $8,365,500, and on up to DiFazio Industries at $20,202,287.50 — more than three times the low number. Thirteen bidders is a real turnout, and the names are the borough's usual sewer-and-streets crowd: Triumph, Halcyon, Perfetto, Dragonetti Brothers. But not one of them found DEP's estimate. When the lowest price on the table runs a third over the engineer's number, the market is telling the agency what this work costs now.

What Pizzirusso signed up for, if the number holds, is drainage work at its most basic. A catch basin is the curbside drain — the grate at the corner that takes stormwater off the street and feeds it into the sewer. DEP's network carries about 152,000 of them, tied into more than 7,400 miles of sewer pipe. The contract title says the job plain: modernization, borough of Queens — bringing aging drainage structures up to standard, corner by corner.

This is flood work, and Queens knows why it matters better than any borough. When a catch basin is broken or blocked, the rain has nowhere to go — it ponds at the intersection, runs down driveways, and ends up in somebody's basement. DEP has spent years and serious money fighting exactly that in the borough's flood-prone neighborhoods: a $51.8 million sewer-and-catch-basin project launched in Rosedale in 2024, $24 million in Hollis and Queens Village before it. A borough-wide catch basin contract is the unglamorous end of the same fight. The drains only protect the block if they work.

The usual caution applies. Apparent low is not an award. DEP reviews the bids — the math, the paperwork, the responsibility checks — before anything is signed, and the distance between its estimate and the entire field is part of what the agency now has to weigh. Nothing on this tab is a contract until DEP says it is.

For the sewer crowd, the tab is worth clipping either way. Thirteen prices on one borough-wide drainage package is a clean read on what Queens catch basin work costs in 2026 — and every one of them landed north of the city's number.