The bids are in on the Manhattan end of the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel. MTA Construction & Development opened ten bids on June 25, 2025 for contract HC-48, the rehabilitation of the tunnel's Manhattan plaza, and J-Track LLC is the apparent low at $38,337,095 — the job of rebuilding the roadway, walls, drains and lighting where the tunnel comes up at the Battery.

This was an A+B contract, which means bidders put a price on the work and a dollar value on their schedule, and the MTA adds the two together to pick the low. On that combined math, J-Track's $38,337,095 edged CAC Industries' $38,439,000 by 0.3 percent — about as close as a bid tab gets. J-Track's construction price alone was $32,010,095 before the schedule value. Behind the front two came Judlau, Restani, Bove Industries, Posillico Civil, Paul J. Scariano, Tully and Navillus, with FOS Development at the top of the tab at $46,753,485. The solicitation notice pegged the job at $10 million to $50 million, and the whole field landed inside that window. Ten bidders and a 0.3 percent gap up front says the market read this one the same way.

What J-Track bid on, per the C&D solicitation notice, is a long list. Reconfigure the plaza to improve traffic safety, including new attenuators — the crash cushions that stand between a drifting car and a concrete wall. Replace the electrical and communications duct bank under the roadway. Repair retaining walls at the plaza and the West Street underpass. Structural repairs and new lighting in the cellular structure beneath the plaza. New overheight-vehicle sensors, new plaza roadway lighting, resurfacing and restriping, and a rehab of the concrete toll-zone pavement. New trench drains at all four portals, on both the Manhattan and Brooklyn sides. Concrete repairs on the underside of the Battery Parking Garage where it hangs over the plaza, a new fire standpipe, a flood-equipment storage enclosure, and a mill, pave and restripe of the full length of both tubes. The notice sets the term at 549 calendar days — roughly eighteen months of work at the mouth of a live tunnel.

The tunnel this plaza feeds opened in 1950 and is still the longest continuous underwater vehicular tunnel in North America, per the MTA. It is the direct road link between Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill on the Brooklyn side and the Wall Street area, Battery Park City and the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. The Manhattan plaza is the tunnel's front door — every driver headed to or from Brooklyn under the harbor passes through this work zone. And most of this scope is the kind of work nobody notices until it's skipped: drains that keep a below-grade tunnel approach from ponding, crash cushions where traffic merges, a standpipe that works the day the fire department needs it.

The usual caveat applies. An apparent low is not an award — these bids are under review, and on an A+B contract the agency checks the schedule math along with the price and the paperwork before anything is signed. One more thing worth flagging: the solicitation carries goals of 15 percent MBE, 15 percent WBE and 6 percent SDVOB, so certified subs should be watching this one. A $32 million construction price carries real subcontract work. The award lands when C&D finishes its review.

A closer look at the full tab shows how the rest of the field sorted out behind J-Track and CAC. Third-place Judlau Contracting came in at $41,098,140 — about 7 percent over the low bid, the first real daylight in the tab. From there: Restani Construction at $41,698,443, Bove Industries at $42,831,000, and Posillico Civil at $42,844,569 — Bove and Posillico landed within $13,600 of each other, tighter even than J-Track and CAC's top-of-the-tab finish. Then Paul J. Scariano (PJS Electric) at $44,911,000, Tully Construction at $45,201,100, Navillus Contracting at $46,084,280, and FOS Development topping the tab at $46,753,485. Low to high, that's an $8.4 million spread across ten bidders — about 22 percent over J-Track's number. The top of the tab was a coin flip. The back half of the field priced this job a lot more cautiously.

The solicitation calls out nine CSI divisions on this job — general requirements, existing conditions, concrete, metals, thermal and moisture protection, finishes, equipment, plumbing and electrical — and that spread says who else has real work here besides the GC. Concrete (03) and structural steel and misc. metals (05) carry the retaining-wall and cellular-structure repairs. Thermal and moisture protection (07) is the waterproofing and joint work. Plumbing (22) is the trench drains, drainage piping and the new standpipe. Electrical (26) is the duct bank and every lighting package in the scope. This is a genuine multi-trade civil job, not a paving contract with a long punch list — subs in each of those divisions belong on this bid, whether or not they ever hit the plan room.

One more thing for the record: this bid date wasn't fixed from the jump. MTA C&D's own contract-documents holders lists show the job posted with a May 15 opening as of early April, then pushed to May 29 by mid-May. It didn't actually open until June 25 — the date this tab reflects — a six-week slip from the first posted date, moved more than once. Worth remembering the next time a Carey Tunnel package posts a date: this owner has moved one before.