The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers New York District is taking Phase One proposals until 2:00 p.m. on October 19 for the mitigation contract at Port Monmouth, in Middletown Township, Monmouth County. The Corps puts the job between $15 million and $30 million. It is unrestricted - no set-aside - with a price preference for HUBZone firms, and it is firm fixed price.

Read the title and you would guess shore protection. It is not. The contract is the wetland acreage the Corps owes for the flood-control work already built at Port Monmouth under the earlier contracts: about 24.8 acres of restored wetland and channel at the Pews Creek and Compton Creek sites, about 8.8 acres of upland, and a tenth of an acre of the Keansburg Levee replanted in native grass. The specification book runs 377 pages and contains no concrete, steel, mechanical, electrical or paving sections at all. If your shop bids buildings, this one is not for you.

What it is instead is a haul job wrapped in a planting job. The drawings carry 38,000 cubic yards of excavation out, 56,800 cubic yards of clean sand and 12,300 cubic yards of topsoil in, roughly 87,100 plants, 1,644 live stakes, 76,250 square yards of herbivory fence and 11,200 linear feet each of silt fence and orange construction fence. None of the Pews Creek cut can be re-used, because the reason for cutting it is to get reed rhizomes off the site.

The trucks are the problem. The documents bar construction traffic from Creek Road, Campbell Avenue and the Keansburg Levee, and the haul route will be set by a traffic study that has not been done yet. The winning team also owes a vibration monitoring plan certified by a professional engineer, with a monitor on the Campbell Avenue Bridge, and the Corps reserves the right to hold monthly public meetings while hauling is underway. Work hours are 7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., weekdays only.

Phase One is capability only - no price, no design, no bid guarantee. The Corps short-lists no more than five firms and takes them into Phase Two. The gate is Factor 1, relevant specialized experience, which the solicitation calls the most important factor and which an unacceptable rating on ends the proposal outright. It asks for a tidal mitigation project and a freshwater forested mitigation project, each at $7 million or more in construction cost, each with documented 85 percent planting survivability five years after completion. A subcontractor's experience counts only with a commitment letter signed by both parties.

Two numbers to price before anything else. Liquidated damages run $3,363 a day, with a second tier of $841 a day for punch list left unfinished after beneficial occupancy. And the bonding is not standard: a bid guarantee of 20 percent or $3 million, whichever is less, in Phase Two; performance and payment bonds within 10 days of award; and then a separate bond covering the second year of the plant warranty, after the crew has left the site. Plenty of surety programs are not written to carry a bond into a second post-completion year.

One more thing worth an RFI. Three different documents in the package give three different in-water work calendars, and the drawings say the two biggest quantities - the excavation out and the sand in - will be recomputed after a pre-construction survey, while the measurement section calls eighteen items unit price and then sets the unit of measure for every one of them to "job." On 95,000 cubic yards of combined movement, lump sum versus measured is the whole risk position.

What to do next: settle the Factor 1 question first, because five-year monitoring documentation cannot be assembled in three weeks - if you do not have both project types in hand, your play is a signed commitment letter with a firm that does. Questions close at 11:59 a.m. Eastern seven days before the closing, which computes to October 12, and the two worth asking are how the excavation and import will actually be measured and paid, and which in-water window governs. Proposals go by email only, to both the contract specialist and the contracting officer, 25 megabytes per message; fax, mail and hand delivery are all rejected.