Offers on the new administration building at Eisenhower Lock in Massena are due at 2:00 p.m. Eastern on Friday, September 25, by email only. The Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation, a federal corporation inside the U.S. Department of Transportation, wants a 10,750-square-foot office building and an attached 1,900-square-foot four-bay maintenance garage, steel framed, on an active lock with the visitor center open to the public the entire time.

It is a 100 percent small-business set-aside under NAICS 236220, and the size standard is $45 million - not the $19 million printed in the RFP, which the first amendment corrected. Award is lowest price technically acceptable: proposals are sorted by price, and if the cheapest one is technically acceptable, nobody else's is even read. Firm fixed price, eight lump-sum line items, no unit prices and no allowances.

The corporation will not say what it thinks the job costs. Two separate contractors asked for the magnitude of construction and were refused both times, the agency citing the federal acquisition overhaul as having removed the disclosure requirement. What the record does show is that nineteen firms attended the September 9 site visit - two paving and excavation outfits, several general contractors, and electrical, mechanical, low-voltage, fire protection and door contractors.

Two gaps in the package are worth knowing about before you price it. The bid guarantee is required with the proposal - 20 percent of the proposed price or $3 million, whichever is less, on Standard Form 24 - and that amount appears nowhere in the 30-page RFP. It exists only in the question-and-answer log, which the third amendment folded into the solicitation on September 17. Miss it and the offer is dead on arrival.

The second gap is in the spec book. Section 054000, cold-formed metal framing, and section 084435, fire-rated glazed assemblies, are both listed in the table of contents of the roughly 1,049-page technical specification and neither has any text in the book. The numbering runs straight past both. On a job decided by price alone, that leaves a framing sub and a glazing sub writing their own scope and hoping it matches whatever the government meant.

The schedule is unforgiving and the agency has said so twice. Performance starts within 10 calendar days of a notice to proceed expected on or about October 15, runs 445 calendar days to completion with substantial completion at 400, and liquidated damages are $2,040 a day. Continuous progress through the winter is written in as a strict requirement, with temporary heat, ground thawing, snow removal and weather protection all at the contractor's cost and in the initial price. Two bidders asked to move substantial completion for winter conditions. Both were told no.

Then there is badging. Every prime and subcontractor employee needs a background investigation before setting foot on the lock - roughly three to four weeks for local applicants who can be fingerprinted in Massena, four to six weeks for out-of-state people, at the contractor's expense, with a resume required for each one. None of it starts until award. One cleared employee may escort five uncleared workers, and truck drivers, suppliers, manufacturer representatives and testing agencies all need escorting too.

One trap in the fire protection scope: the VID Fire-Kill low-pressure water mist system is brand-name mandatory with no substitutions, justified in part by low water pressure at the site. Read the justification quickly and you would conclude the pump came out along with the tank. It did not. Only the water storage tank is gone; the drawings and specifications still carry a 250 gallon-per-minute, 150 psig, 50-horsepower fire pump. A bidder who drops it is short an entire assembly.

What to do next: if you are bidding, confirm the offer guarantee figure against the agency's own posting before you buy the bond, and get a written answer on the two missing spec sections - questions formally closed September 11, but a scope hole this size is worth a call to the contracting officer anyway. If you are chasing sub work instead, the September 9 attendee list is the short list of who is likely bidding this, and the badging clock means the winner will want subs lined up the week of award, not the month after.