B 0.0
Scopes of work
Five scopes, laid out the way a schedule of work is laid out. Each has its own unit prices, its own list of things that have to be defined before anybody can price it, and its own answer to the question of what carries the flow while the work happens.
W, Potable water SS, Sanitary sewer APWA uniform colour code
Four of these five scopes are things most civil contractors do. The fifth — rebuilding a plant while it keeps meeting its permit — is the one that decides whether the other four were worth buying from the same firm.
Nearly every municipal water and wastewater project in Colorado is a retrofit. Districts do not build new plants often; they expand, upgrade and replace the plants they have, usually because a permit limit tightened or the population grew. So the work arrives as a new structure plus a tie-in, a pipeline plus a shutdown, a pump station plus a bypass. The second half is where the risk is.
That is why these five are one list rather than five separate offerings. The excavation crew that opens the trench, the carpenters who form the wall, the pipe layers and the operators who run the bypass are the same crew list, which is what makes it possible to sequence the work around a live plant instead of around four subcontractors' calendars. See what we self-perform.
How to read the colour
Blue and green on this site are not brand colours. They are the APWA uniform colour code — the same code that gets painted on a street before anyone digs.
- Blue
- Potable water, APWA code W
- Green
- Sanitary sewer and drain, APWA code SS
- White
- Proposed excavation — the page ground
They identify what is in a pipe and nothing else. They are never used to mean important, or new, or good. That constraint is the whole visual system.
B 0.2 The schedule of work
Five scopes, each with a price
Typical spans are planning ranges for a scheduling conversation and assume a normal procurement path and workable weather.
New water and wastewater treatment structures and process systems, from excavation and cast-in-place concrete through mechanical installation, commissioning and operator training.
- You receive
- Commissioning and startup records, O&M manuals, operator training
Rebuilding a process train while the plant keeps meeting its permit. Bypass pumping, staged demolition, tie-ins scheduled at low flow, and a written procedure for every hour the plant is vulnerable.
- You receive
- Bypass plan, shutdown and tie-in procedures, as-built record
Gravity sewer, water mains and force mains in open cut and by trenchless methods, including the surface restoration that is what a resident actually sees when it is finished.
- You receive
- Pressure and leakage tests, CCTV inspection, record drawings
Wet wells, valve vaults, pumps, piping, electrical and controls, and the standby power that decides what happens to a collection system when the grid goes down.
- You receive
- Commissioning record, control narrative verification, O&M manuals
Cast-in-place water-retaining concrete, vaults, tanks, headworks, grading, drainage and restoration — the civil scope that everything mechanical is bolted to.
- You receive
- Concrete test records, hydrostatic testing, record drawings
The span for your project comes from a schedule built against a defined scope. Every scope page publishes the unit prices for that scope; the whole sheet, by division, is on the unit price page.
B 0.3 Right and wrong fits
What we are the right contractor for
Worth reading before you invite a bid, because the wrong fit costs you a procurement cycle and costs us a bid we should not have submitted.
| Project | Fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Process train rebuilt on a live plant | Right | The sequence, the bypass and the tie-in are the project, and they are self-performed |
| New treatment structure or plant expansion | Right | Water-retaining concrete, process piping and commissioning are our own crews |
| Collection or distribution system replacement | Right | Pipe, manholes, services and restoration in one crew list, with the street back quickly |
| Lift station replacement or rehabilitation | Right | Wet well, pumps, controls and standby power, with the alarm path tested end to end |
| A single residential water or sewer connection | Wrong | A local utility contractor will do it faster and cheaper; we would be the expensive answer |
| Building construction with a utility scope attached | Wrong | A building general contractor should hold that, and we are happy to be their civil sub |
| A project so large we would broker most of it | Wrong | Self-performance is the argument; a project that defeats it defeats the reason to hire us |
The last row is the uncomfortable one and it is the one worth trusting. A crew list is a fixed capacity, and a firm that tells you it is the right size for everything is telling you something about its sales process rather than about its crews.
B 0.4 Before you award
Three documents worth reading first
These are the pages that explain how the work is delivered, which is a different question from what the work is.
Describe the facility and the constraint
What it has to do, what it does now, what the permit requires, and what can be taken out of service and for how long. That last one is usually the tightest constraint on the whole project and the one least often established before a bid goes out.
RN Civil Construction, LLC · 6025 S Quebec St, Englewood, CO 80111