Three more NYCHHC contracts close October 14, and for the third time in recent weeks the health system is asking contractors to price hospital work without telling them what it expects to pay.

The jobs span three boroughs and three very different trades. Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens needs its steam tank modernized. South Brooklyn Health needs a second-floor roof replaced over its loading dock and morgue. Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn needs its LINAC suite — the shielded room that houses radiation therapy equipment — renovated. None of the three postings carries an estimated value.

“You're pricing a radiation suite and a morgue roof off the same spec-book-only playbook — with nothing to check your number against.”

That's not unusual for NYCHHC specifically. The agency has run this pattern across its recent solicitations: real scope, real deadlines, no dollar range. For an estimator, that means the engineer's estimate isn't available as a sanity check before you build your own number from scratch — you're pricing steam plant work, roofing over a morgue, and radiation-suite renovation with nothing but the spec book to go on.

The three trades barely overlap, which is the real story here. A firm chasing the Elmhurst steam job needs mechanical and plumbing capacity; South Brooklyn's roof work is a straight building-envelope job; Kings County's LINAC suite likely requires specialty radiation-shielding subcontractors most GCs don't keep on speed dial. A contractor treating this as one NYCHHC "hospital work" bucket is going to misjudge at least two of the three.

All three bids are due October 14 — three weeks out. That's enough runway to request the pre-bid documents and build an independent estimate, but not enough to wait around for NYCHHC to post a number that, based on its recent pattern, likely isn't coming.