The reinstall has no pay item to bill against
The plumber cut your silt fence to trench, the inspector wrote the deficiency against your scope, and the repair has nowhere to go except your cost code.
No other trade on that job builds something other crews are expected to damage as a normal part of doing their work. A framer whose wall gets cut collects a backcharge because the damage is obvious, dated, and attributable to one crew. Yours happens in a trench line at 6 a.m. with no witness, so by the time the inspector walks it, the deficiency just looks like you didn't maintain your fence.
The size of it
The same 2,000 LF of silt fence gets installed two or three times over a job and measured once. Those reinstalls typically cost 8% to 15% of contract value, going unseen in the same cost code as the original install.
Your finished product gets installed on purpose in the path of every other trade on the site. The utility crew cuts fence for a trench, the dirt crew covers the wattle, paving pulls inlet protection, and grading tracks mud past the construction entrance. Erosion control owns the pay item, so the inspector writes the deficiency against you, and the next business day repair clock starts. Specs commonly call maintenance and repair of erosion control incidental to the installed unit price, so there's no line to bill the second install against.
Three moves, in order
Step 08: Standards and accountability
Five hours a month of owner time, spent projecting the work.
What else costs SWPPP and erosion control contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What SWPPP and erosion control owners ask
How do I backcharge another sub for cutting my silt fence?
The plumber cut your silt fence to trench, the inspector wrote the deficiency against your scope, and the repair has nowhere to go except your cost code.
What does it cost?
The same 2,000 LF of silt fence gets installed two or three times over a job and measured once. Those reinstalls typically cost 8% to 15% of contract value, going unseen in the same cost code as the original install.
What do I do first?
Document the damage the same day, every time: timestamped photo, station or grid location, the sub who did it, and a text to the GC super before you send anybody to fix it.
What are SWPPP and erosion control contractors supposed to be making?
SWPPP and erosion control has 24% gross margin, 14% overhead and 10% net profit after taxes at $1M to $5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade is 3 points above it. The CFOS target is 13.5%.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 08, standards and accountability. Five hours a month of owner time, spent projecting the work. It comes from chapter 8 of CONTROL: C.F.O.S. Construction Financial Operating System.
Everything on this page is something you can install yourself, and CONTROL is the order to do it in. If you would rather buy the finished result, SPM The Construction CFO does this work for SWPPP and erosion control contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, led by the same author.
What a fractional CFO does for SWPPP and erosion control contractors
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.