FEMA has two construction packages on the same building closing Monday, and both are 100 percent small-business set-asides. The building is C-54 at Naval Weapons Station Earle in Colts Neck, New Jersey -- FEMA Region 2's operations site, run out of the agency's office at 1 World Trade Center. One package is HVAC. The other is everything else. Neither has been advertised anywhere a New York trade contractor would normally look.
Package one, solicitation 70FBR226R00000018, is mechanical, with a disclosed price cap of about $1.269 million under NAICS 238220. Four rooftop units come off and go back -- a 40-ton, a 30-ton, a 12.5-ton Carrier and a 3-ton. The server room loses one unit and gains two; the existing pair are 5-ton Lieberts. Then the part that will decide the price: two Modine 400,000 BTU natural-gas, power-vented suspended heaters, or approved equal, to heat roughly 17,460 square feet of warehouse that apparently has not been heated properly in years. The contractor extends the gas service out of the mechanical room, and owns the piping, venting, combustion air, electrical, controls, supports, penetrations and commissioning that come with it.
Read the amendment before you price that warehouse. The heating scope was rewritten on September 9, and the Q&A says flatly that where any earlier answer conflicts with the amended statement of work, the amended statement of work wins. A heat-loss calculation is required before you order anything, and heater locations, gas pipe sizing, vent routing and controls all get field-verified and government-approved before a single unit goes up. The controls are not a throwaway either -- the building runs a Honeywell 9000 series BMS, the spec sheet is in the package, and the agency confirmed new controls are not assumed to be stand-alone.
Package two, solicitation 70FBR226R00000016, is the general-contract job: about $1.848 million under NAICS 236220, four scopes consolidated into one award. ADA-compliant automated entry doors with ballistic glazing and access-control integration, plus nine interior wood doors with glazed lites. A full renovation of the Regional Response Coordination Center -- 3,100 square feet of carpet out and commercial LVT in, 110 linear feet of temporary wall demolished, 170 linear feet of laminated acoustic frosted glass wall at STC 35 running to a 10-foot ceiling, three glass doors, 56 old workstations hauled out. Exterior concrete at the loading dock and ramp, and a sidewalk widened from three feet to five over a hundred-foot run, rated to carry 14,000 pounds. And one training-room wall stripped to the studs, backed with three-quarter-inch plywood and re-rocked to hold a video wall that has not been bought yet.
The low-voltage line item is the one to count twice. Eighty-two workstations, four Cat 6 cables and four outlets apiece -- 328 runs, terminated at both the desk and at patch panels the contractor supplies and installs on the existing telecom racks, every cable labeled at both ends, every cable tested end to end with the reports handed over as proof. That is a real subcontract sitting inside a $1.8 million job, and the general contractor also has to coordinate the whole build-out around a furniture vendor's schedule.
What will disqualify more bidders than price: this is an active naval weapons station. Every person on site must be a U.S. citizen. Base security runs a background check on a NAVSEC 5512 for everyone needing access, and on the HVAC job that adjudication -- Tier 1 with a credit check, or Tier 2 where FEMA systems are involved -- has to come back favorable before anybody starts work, not before they finish it. Drivers need a valid Real ID, registration and proof of insurance, and every commercial vehicle gets inspected inside and out at the gate, every trip. Work runs 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekdays. If your crew is not all citizens and your paperwork is not moving now, the schedule is already against you.
Both awards are firm fixed price on a best-value basis with a one-year period of performance, and both carry bonding as its own priced line at 3 percent of total project cost. Wage determinations differ -- the HVAC job cites No. 2015-4195 Revision 33; the facility-upgrade job cites Davis-Bacon NJ20260037, Mod 1. On the mechanical package, the closing time on the solicitation form is 11 a.m. Eastern on September 14. On the facility-upgrade package the form says 4 p.m. while the same-day Q&A says 11 a.m. -- confirm the hour against the current amendment on SAM.gov before you plan your submission, because the two agency documents do not agree.
Both jobs ride on our board, as RFI-002316 and RFI-002317. For a small New York-area mechanical or building contractor with citizenship-clean crews, this is the shape of federal work that rarely gets seen in time: two packages, one roof, one closing day, both fenced off to small business, and a price ceiling the government printed rather than made you guess at.