A Colorado civil contractor, since 2002

The company was founded in 2002 by Daniel P. Niehus and has worked in Colorado ever since. It is a heavy civil contractor in the specific sense: water and sewer lines and related structures, NAICS 237110, for public owners.

What distinguishes the work is not a claim about quality, which every contractor makes and no reader can check. It is a structural fact about how the work is staffed: we self-perform more than 75% of a typical project with our own workforce and our own equipment. The excavation, the cast-in-place concrete, the pipe, the structures, the selective demolition, the bypass and the site work are all done by people on our payroll.

On an ordinary job that is a cost argument. On a plant that has to keep meeting its permit while it is rebuilt, it is a risk argument, and the risk argument is much stronger: the sequence compresses to what the work needs rather than to what four subcontractors' schedules can agree on, and at two in the morning during a tie-in, the crew is people whose previous tie-ins we have watched.

That page — what we self-perform — also sets out four ways to verify the claim rather than take it, because a self-performance figure is the easiest thing in this industry to assert and one of the easiest to check.

What we are organised around

A wastewater treatment plant cannot be switched off. The discharge permit has no construction exemption in it, and the collection system keeps delivering flow whether or not there is anywhere for it to go.

Nearly every municipal plant project in Colorado is therefore a retrofit. Cities do not build new plants often; they expand, upgrade and replace what 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 — and the second half is where the risk lives.

Everything about how we run a project follows from that: the bypass sized on peak wet-weather flow and proven before anything is demolished, the tie-in treated as a written operation rather than a construction activity, the three hold points on the process page. None of it is unusual practice. What is unusual is writing it down where an owner can read it before awarding work.

Who the work is for

Municipalities, water and sanitation districts, metropolitan districts, and the consulting engineers who design for them. We also work as a civil subcontractor to general contractors where a building scope dominates and the utility and site work is one part of a larger project.

Those owners have obligations we do not: public procurement, prevailing wage, bonding, reporting to a board, and a discharge permit with their name on it. A contractor who makes any of those harder is a contractor who costs more than the bid.

The audience we actually build for

An engineer reads the sequence. A public works director reads the risk. A finance officer reads whether the number holds. A board reads one page.

And then, long after all four have moved on, an operator lives with the facility every day for thirty years. Valve access, clearance to pull a pump, whether a walkway is usable in February, where the hose bib is — those are the things a plant is actually judged by, and they are worth raising during construction rather than discovering at startup.

The operators are the last audience and the most important one, which is why the closeout package and the training are a milestone rather than an afterthought.