All Forum Posts by: Will Brown

Thanks for your reply, Jim.

1. I hired the engineer directly, the architect knows him well too. The engineer is one of the dominant firms locally, and is reputable.

2. Yes, we've picked a GC, who is local too.

3. The project has 15 units on 0.9 care, with 26 parking spaces. The initial charge for the construction documents is $10K. There are other services (survey, site plan review etc) that proceeds the construction documents, and those cost $22K.

4.There are 70 comments the city made on the construction documents, none of them is unreasonable. Most are minor, cosmetic ones. The engineer did not make any fatal errors or have to dispute anything major with the city. This engineering firm is located within 2 miles from the city hall and work with the city a lot, and they know the reviewers very well too.

My architect did say he does not usually see so many comments from the city. I think one cause of so many comments is that there was a new engineer who did a lot of the work on our project, and he stayed at the firm for less than a year and has just left the firm recently, and a different engineer is dealing with the city's comments now.

The issue with T&M contract is that a disreputable firm may have the incentive to over-charge. I don't want to think the firm we chose is doing this, but they certainly don't have strong incentives to do things fast, and I'm paying them to correct their own omissions/errors of the inexperienced engineer who were assigned on our project.

So as you can see, I did my homework in choosing a local, reputable firm, who does lots of business with the city, and still ran into such an issue. I think the inherent issue is with the T&M contract, yet I don't see a way around it, even for my next project down the road. 

Any thoughts?

I'm developing a multi-family community from scratch, and hired a local civil engineer firm for site work (grading, erosion control, drainage plan, etc.) design. The design will be used to get city permits. 

It is expected that after we file the permit application, the city will come back with comments for us to revise the plan, and it is unclear how much change they city will want. So, in the contract we signed with the civil engineer, we have a fixed dollar figure for the initial design work leading up to permit application. However, due to the uncertainty of how much the engineer will have to work on the city's comments, our contract with the engineer says the engineer's work to address the city's comments will be on a time and material basis.

A few days ago the city got back to us with their comments regarding our permit application. The engineer told me an engineer will need to work 8 days full time to address all the comments, which seems to be an exaggeration of the work involved. Yet there is nothing I can do about it. It is impractical to change the engineer at this point.

I think this is a pretty common problem, very much like being presented a change order (on a time and material basis) by a General Contractor, except it is much hard to determine the time needed for an engineer to finish his job.

How do you deal with such a situation? I'm asking this both for the situation at hand, and for future reference.

If I can do things all over again, it seems my only choice is still a time and material contract for the engineer to work on the city's comments. Any suggestions?