Parks just handed the night shift three more hours on its East River seawall job. Addendum 1 to the East River Esplanade seawall reconstruction, the stretch of waterfront along the FDR Drive between East 36th and East 38th Streets in Manhattan, swaps out one page of the contract book. The old page let you work weeknights from 7 p.m. to midnight. The new one says 7 p.m. to 3 a.m.
Here's the catch. The old window needed written approval from Parks. The new one needs that approval plus coordination with the city Department of Transportation, because there's a ferry terminal just south of the site. And the part that hurts didn't move. The book still expects no work Monday through Friday from 6 to 10 in the morning or 3 to 7 in the evening, the peak ferry hours. That's eight hours a day gone before you've set an anchor.
“Price the lost hours into your units, because nobody's paying for them later.”
Nothing else changes. No bid date, no quantities, no drawings. Bids are due November 2 at 10:30 a.m. through PASSPort, the city's online bidding system, and the opening is at 11:30 a.m. by Zoom. A pre-bid conference is set for October 22 at 10 a.m., also by Zoom, and it's not mandatory. One housekeeping note. The addendum letter is dated September 29, 2024 as printed, on a job advertised September 21, 2026. Track it as Addendum 1 under EPIN 84627B0009, not by the date. By bidding, you confirm you got it.
Now look at the bid sheet. Twenty items, unit price and lump sum, one base bid total, no alternates. The core of the job is four repair lines. There are 1,318 linear feet of single and group pile encasements, 2,160 square feet of seawall concrete repairs, 120 square feet of underdeck spall repairs at the deck joints, and 3,318 cubic yards of mass encasement.
That last one is the surprise. The mass encasement isn't concrete. The spec calls for "a hydrophobic closed-cell polyurethane foam that expands after placement," pumped into stay-in-place forms you design yourself, with calculations from a New York engineer, watertight in the tidal zone. Alchemy-Spetec and Uretek are the named manufacturers, or approved equal. Your price per cubic yard has to carry the forms, the foam, the boats and barges, and the dive crews.
The pile encasements are concrete, 5,000 psi, pumped underwater into see-through fiberglass forms around the existing timber piles. Read that spec twice. A diver has to watch every pour the whole way. You need a second concrete plant on standby and backup cranes and pumps on site. A cleaned pile gets encased within 72 hours or you clean it again. No pours when the water is below 35 degrees. And one form in every 20 comes off for inspection. If more than 5 percent of the inspected encasements show significant defects, cores come out of 10 percent of all installations, and the contract says the full cost of that coring is yours.
One more thing on that item. The bid sheet gives you a single line for 1,318 feet. The spec says the unit price is "based on encasement type" and then lists fourteen types, from 21-inch to 25-inch single piles, with and without a pile wrap, plus four sizes of group encasement. The bid sheet and the spec don't say how the footage splits. Send that question in before you blend a price.
The seawall work gets built from the water. The contract book puts work barges and staging at the north end, away from the ferry. The work happens under the deck and inside a turbidity curtain, and materials and crews come in by water. The book says flat out that ferry traffic and its wake will be a challenge, and that you have no claim for delay over the ferry coordination. A second clause says the same about any other City contractors working next door. Price the lost hours into your units, because nobody's paying for them later.
The paper. You get 548 consecutive calendar days to substantial completion, and liquidated damages run $1,000 a day on a contract of $1 million or more. Bid security is a 5 percent bond or deposit, with 100 percent payment and performance bonds and 5 percent retainage. Subcontracts can't top 50 percent of the contract price, so the prime has to hold at least half the job itself. Mobilization is capped at 6 percent of the other 19 items and isn't payable until your earned work passes 10 percent of the bid. A $200,000 allowance is already filled in, and only Parks can spend it.
Who can bid? You need one finished job of similar size, scope and complexity as a prime, for a city agency, a public authority or a jurisdiction with similar regulatory requirements, in the last three years. The repair specs also want the contractor endorsed by the repair-product manufacturer, with a three-year record. On insurance, Parks checked three marine policies. Those are protection and indemnity, hull and machinery, and marine pollution. The Jones Act and Longshore boxes on the same form are blank. For a job run off barges with divers, ask about that in writing.
Labor and goals. Prevailing wage applies, and the wage schedule in the book carries marine diver and diver tender classifications. If the contract tops $3 million, the Community Hiring goal kicks in. That's 30 percent of construction hours, best efforts, and it flows down to your subs. The prime, and any sub with a subcontract of $2 million or more, needs a state-registered apprenticeship program that's past its two-year probation. The job falls under the city's M/WBE program, but the goal percentages aren't printed in the contract book. They're on Schedule B in PASSPort.
No estimate for this contract is printed anywhere in the bid documents. The only cost numbers are in a 2020 inspection report bound into the book for information only. It priced three concepts in 2020 dollars, at an accuracy of minus 30 to plus 50 percent. The repair option, a different mix of repairs from this bid sheet, came to $12,000,000, and the report put the construction budget at "approximately $12 million." The two replacement options ran $20,800,000 and $25,600,000. That same report rated the platform poor across the board. It says the structure was built in 1994 and sits on an estimated 1,294 timber piles. Don't bid off a six-year-old concept number.
So here's what to do. The documents are free on PASSPort. Questions go in writing no later than seven days before the due date, which against November 2 works out to October 26. Ask about the pile encasement breakdown and the blank Jones Act box. Then make sure the total you key into PASSPort matches the total on your uploaded bid item spreadsheet, because a mismatch is listed grounds for tossing the bid. On this job the ferry schedule is a cost item. It just isn't on the bid sheet.