How to get government engineering and surveying contracts

The Brooks Act, 40 U.S.C. 1101 to 1104, requires federal agencies to select architects and engineers on demonstrated competence and qualifications and then negotiate a fair and reasonable fee, starting with the most qualified firm. FAR Subpart 36.6 implements it. For state and local owners spending federal highway money, 23 CFR 172.7 applies the same procedure and is explicit: price shall not be used as a factor in the evaluation, ranking and selection phase, and cost proposals, salary rates, indirect cost rates and other direct costs are prohibited as evaluation criteria.

Most states have their own version for state and local work funded with state or local money:

The definition of covered services matters. Florida's includes architecture, engineering, landscape architecture and registered surveying and mapping, and most states are similar, which is why surveyors live under the same rule. Services outside the definition may be bought by ordinary RFP with price scored. Qualifications-based selection: how to win engineering work when price is not scored walks through the process step by step.

Every public owner with infrastructure buys engineering, and almost every one of them publishes what it intends to build. The capital improvement plan, adopted annually with the budget, lists projects, estimated costs and the year each is funded, typically five years out. That is the demand pipeline, and it is free.

Two further sources: state revolving fund intended use plans, which list every water and wastewater project a state intends to fund, and bond measures, which become multi-year design programs the day after the election. The buyer guides for how to sell to county government, how to sell to municipalities and city government, how to sell to special districts: water, fire, transit and parks and how to sell to state agencies explain how each approves awards.

Most local owners do not solicit a designer for each project. They select a pool of firms under an on-call, indefinite delivery agreement and issue task orders as projects fund. A seat produces revenue for three to five years; losing the solicitation means waiting for the next cycle.

On federally funded highway work, 23 CFR 172.9 sets the rules: the solicitation must specify a reasonable maximum contract period including extensions, not to exceed five years, and a maximum total dollar amount; and task orders shall not be competed among the selected firms on the basis of cost. Task orders go out either by a qualifications-based mini-selection or on a regional basis. Local owners spending their own money copy the structure and often set a ceiling per firm, commonly 500,000 dollars to several million, and a per-task-order limit above which a project-specific selection is required.

Three things follow. Track the expiry of every on-call in your region, because the re-solicitation is announced a few months before it. Read the task order rules, because a rotation gives every firm a turn while a discretionary assignment favors the firm the project manager already trusts. And once you hold a seat, the work is won in the project manager's office, not in a proposal. See IDIQ contract.

The federal Standard Form 330 is the qualifications document for every federal A-E selection, and its structure has been copied by so many state and local owners that learning it once pays everywhere. Part I is contract-specific: Section C the proposed team, D the organizational chart, E resumes of key personnel, F up to ten example projects, G the matrix showing which key people worked on which example projects, and H additional information, which is where the approach and the answers to the owner's stated criteria go. Part II is the firm's general qualifications and is filed annually.

FAR 36.602-1 sets the federal evaluation factors, and most state and local rubrics are variations on them:

The evaluators score Sections E, F and G against each other. A resume that lists a project not in Section F, or a Section F project on which none of the Section E people worked, is scored down because the matrix in Section G exposes it. Build the team first, then choose the projects the team actually did.

Selection is not a contract. The owner negotiates scope, hours and fee with the top-ranked firm, and under every mini-Brooks statute it may end negotiations and go to the second-ranked firm if it cannot reach agreement. The negotiation is where firms that have never done public work lose money.

• Indirect cost rate. On federally funded work, 23 CFR 172.11 requires costs to follow the FAR Part 31 cost principles. Your overhead rate is established by a cognizant agency audit or a CPA audit the agency concurs with, updated annually to your accounting period, and the owner must accept the cognizant rate. The AASHTO Uniform Audit and Accounting Guide is the working manual. A firm without a FAR-compliant overhead audit can be limited to a provisional or safe-harbor rate, and many state DOTs will not prequalify it for cost-plus work at all.
• Fixed fee. The same section says fixed fee above 15 percent of direct labor plus indirect costs may be justified only in exceptional circumstances. Typical negotiated fees run 10 to 15 percent.
• Design fee cap. On federal projects the fee for producing designs, plans, drawings and specifications may not exceed 6 percent of the estimated construction cost, under 41 U.S.C. 1102 and 10 U.S.C. 3322 as implemented by FAR 15.404-4(c)(4)(i). Several states have adopted similar caps.

Non-federal local work is looser: many cities negotiate a lump sum or a not-to-exceed with hourly rates and skip the overhead audit. Read which regime applies before you accept the selection, because a FAR-audited overhead rate is a six-month project. See Not-to-exceed (NTE).

The scoring rubric rewards comparable public projects, and a firm without them cannot score. The way out is to be a subconsultant on a larger firm's team, do a discrete scope well, and use that project in your own Section F two years later. Primes need subs for three reasons: to fill disciplines they lack, to add a local office, and to meet participation goals.

The participation goal is the most reliable door. On any project with US Department of Transportation money, 49 CFR Part 26 requires the recipient to set a Disadvantaged Business Enterprise goal, and on goal-bearing contracts the prime must meet it or document good-faith efforts. Certification is through the state Unified Certification Program and is reciprocal within the state. Surveying, geotechnical, environmental, traffic and public involvement are the scopes primes most often carve out for DBE subs. State and local MBE, WBE and SBE programs work the same way for non-federal money. See how to get DBE certified and how to get MBE certified.

When you sub, negotiate three things in writing before the SOQ is submitted: your scope and percentage, your right to use the project as a reference, and whether the teaming agreement is exclusive for that pursuit. When you prime, name subs with real scope and a signed commitment; an evaluator can see a DBE listed at two percent with no defined work, and scores it accordingly.

Surveying rides under the same qualifications-based statutes, and public owners buy a lot of it.

• Right-of-way surveying for state DOTs and counties: parcel maps, legal descriptions, monumentation and exhibits for acquisition. Bought under DOT on-call survey contracts with prequalification, and the largest single survey market in most states.
• Boundary and topographic surveys for design projects, usually as a subconsultant to the design engineer or under a separate city or district survey on-call.
• ALTA/NSPS land title surveys when a public owner buys, sells or leases property, performed to the 2021 ALTA/NSPS standards with the Table A items the owner selects.

A survey firm's SOQ is scored on licensed surveyors in responsible charge, equipment, and comparable public projects, exactly as an engineer's is. The most common route in is a seat on a county or city on-call survey pool with a modest ceiling, which produces the public references the DOT contract later demands.

1. Price in the submission. Under a qualifications-based statute, a fee, a rate table or a cost estimate in the SOQ can be grounds for rejection, because the owner is prohibited from considering it. Do not include it unless the solicitation asks for it in a separate sealed envelope after ranking.
2. Licensure gaps. The firm must hold the state certificate of authorization and the key personnel must hold the state license, at submission, not at award. Evaluators check the board's public lookup.
3. Page and format violations. SF 330 sections have page limits and many owners cap the whole SOQ at 30 to 50 pages. Excess pages are removed before scoring.
4. Missing forms and addenda. Non-collusion affidavits, conflict of interest disclosures, DBE commitment forms, insurance certificates, and acknowledgment of every addendum.

The how to build an RFP compliance matrix habit prevents all four. how to respond to an RFP covers the mechanics, and how to request a debrief after losing a bid explains how to get the score sheets after a loss, which in this market are public and unusually informative.

Engineering and survey firms rarely lose public work on qualifications. They lose it by not knowing an on-call was re-soliciting until the SOQ was due in nine days, by putting a rate table in a document that was not allowed to contain one, or by submitting a Section F built from whatever projects were handy rather than the ones that match the owner's criteria.

That is the work we do. We find the on-calls, project-specific selections and survey pools you can win, across every owner and CIP in your region. We read every page of each solicitation and tell you why it fits or does not. Then we write the SOQ: the team, the project sheets built to the criteria, the matrix, the approach, the forms. You set the fee when negotiation comes and you sign. Every response is built for one company and never reused.

If you want to see what is open for your firm right now, book twenty minutes and we will walk through it with you.