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C IL | Here, I’d probably tell the guys on the phone to just get bids from three good contractors and tell them they don’t need an engineer unless they really, really want one. That’s pretty straightforward and well within the drainage commissioners authority here.
If you want an actual deliverable from an engineer it’s hard to do much, even the simplest thing, for less than $1000. You put a PE stamp on something and you have to be willing to stand behind it, so unless you have previous experience with the site and the commissioners that means site visit, survey, design report, plans and specs. Site visit and survey eats up 60% of the time.
You need a guy to drive an hour and see you and listen to your problem and make suggestions for the next hour it’s $250 and you (the farmer) don’t even have a piece of paper in your hand. Hard for me to want to market my name that way so I try to avoid those situations. I did it once, charged the guy $400, and still feel bad about it since he got good advice but really has nothing concrete to show for it.
Seems crazy but by the time you listen to the guys problem for an hour, do a preliminary hour on the computer to get background watershed characteristics and maps, drive to the site and listen for two more hours to get the whole story, survey for 20-120 minutes, get home, plot it up pretty and make up the design, take another 90 minutes to make up plans and a written cost estimate and site visit report, and answered three rounds of follow up questions, you’ve shot 10 hours. It seems like overkill to the farmer involved because it’s in his backyard and he knows a all the history, until you have to pass it off through an attorney, absentee landowner, judge, etc. and make sure they all understand it.
The overhead for such a project is a real killer since it’s 80% of the time and there’s really no engineering.
Edited by sand85 7/12/2018 15:37
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Ditch assessments and watershed drainage from below revisited.
