The invitation for bids that Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation posted for one boiler ran 946 pages. Bids on PIN-000350 — Restoration of Boilers at Building 62, now renumbered Building 103 — closed at noon September 22, and no tabulation has posted yet. A document that size for one mechanical replacement isn't padding: this is a job with a flood, a state-supervised contamination site, and a federal disaster grant stacked on a mechanical scope that would otherwise be a fraction the size.
Superstorm Sandy flooded the low-pressure steam boiler in Building 62 in 2012, and BNYDC is finally replacing it — higher up. The contractor demolishes the existing gas-fired boiler, builds a new pile-supported steel-and-concrete platform above the site's dry flood elevation, wraps it in a masonry enclosure with a green roof, and installs a new Peerless CC-09 cast-iron sectional boiler, shipped in pieces and assembled in the field, with a duplex feed system, a 10-inch prefabricated flue, and break-glass gas-detection stations at every egress door. Foundation runs on helical piles to 25 tons ultimate capacity.
“The spec calls for a boiler rated at 5,810 MBH. The drawings call for one rated at 1,262 MBH. Nobody's printed which number wins, and bids already closed.”
What wraps around that scope is what makes it 946 pages. This is a FEMA-funded job (grant PW4388), pulling in the federal Uniform Federal Contract Provisions Rider and suspension-and-debarment paperwork most bidders have never priced against. Building 62 also sits inside the Navy Yard's state-supervised contamination cleanup area (DEC site V00120, PCBs primary concern) — any digging that breaks the engineered cover triggers its own excavation work plan, health and safety plan, and air monitoring. The bid form carries three separate per-ton disposal prices — non-hazardous, hazardous, and PCB-contaminated soil — because nobody knows yet which kind comes out of that hole.
Search all 946 pages for "Project Labor Agreement" and you get nothing — no PLA, no letter-of-assent requirement, unlike two Health + Hospitals jobs bidding in this same batch (North Central Bronx and Woodhull), which both carry the HHC PLA. In its place: New York's standard Labor Law 220/230 prevailing wage, a DOL Contractor Registry certificate attached to the bid, and OSHA 10/30 for every worker. Because this is FEMA, not HUD, Davis-Bacon is expressly waived in writing — what applies instead is the Copeland Anti-Kickback Act and the Contract Work Hours and Safety Standards Act.
Two numbers in the schedule aren't the same thing: substantial completion is due 370 days after notice to proceed — that's what the $1,000-a-day liquidated damages run against — while the "two-year anticipated contract length" elsewhere is the paperwork window (closeout, warranty retainage, final payment), not the field schedule. BNYDC expects to pick a winner around December, work starting in winter, finishing around spring 2028. Bid security is a 10% bond or certified check, waived under $250,000; insurance calls for $1M/$2M general liability, a $5M umbrella and $1M pollution liability. The M/WBE goal is 30%.
One thing the documents don't settle: how big the boiler actually is. The spec calls for 5,810 MBH gross output; the drawings spec 1,262 MBH — roughly a 4.6-to-1 gap between two supposedly final documents. Questions closed September 10, twelve days before bids, and nothing in the file resolves it. There was a harder deadline, too: the mandatory walkthrough was August 26, four weeks before bids closed, no exceptions for missing it. No tabulation has posted yet — watch the Bid Results board, and if you're chasing the next BNYDC job, put the walkthrough on your calendar the day the solicitation drops.