While you were sleeping, Santa brought an early present this year: federal acknowledgement that there are high-quality, balance-risk contract documents that can be used as templates and model language in infrastructure delivery.
The Engineering Joint Contract Document Committee (EJCDC) has been hard at work during the last two years to get their documents approved for federal contracts. The EJCDC is a joint venture of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the American Council of Engineering Consultants (ACEC) and the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE). The documents are a long-term collaboration of engineers and lawyers (EJCDC will turn 50 next year) to create documents that balance risk and are of the highest-quality documents for U.S. infrastructure projects.
They’re balanced and contain fair provisions, reduce conflict and litigation, and are the most thorough and well-organized documents across all delivery systems in the United States. Fifteen other professional engineering design, construction, owner, legal and risk-management organizations are regular participants.
An Urgent Need
The USDA has been using the documents for quite some time for their Rural Delivery Service program. When the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) was passed, we understood that the new funding would allow some 60,000 local, state and tribal governments—plus authorities and some private-sector organizations—to access the funding, but there was no contractual template offered by the government. That meant all contracts needed detailed state and then federal approval, adding administrative costs and time to delivery. It was time to get to work and get the feds to agree to templates.
Approximately 60 percent of the BIL went to the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) and its agencies, so we went to work. The USDOT John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center’s Center of Excellence Delivery Toolbox is a collection of resources and best practices to help implement construction projects on time, on task and on budget. Late in June 2024, the Volpe Center of Excellence Toolbox listed the EJCDC documents as high-quality sources of templates and model language that are transportation related, off the shelf and from high-quality sources. Other listed documents include the ACEC, ASCE and NSPE individual documents; the Design Build Institute of America documents; the FHWA documents; and the USDA documents.
ASCE created an accompanying infographic to show clients in simple terms what it all means.
These are the types of streamlined documents we need to make projects more effective and efficient. Many of the rules and processes are decades old and don’t meet modern needs. It’s up to us as experts in infrastructure to identify how we can do more with less and compress schedules. And yes, it’s possible.
The next time you’re planning a project with federal funding, you have the EJCDC documents as one of your risk-management tools.
About Maria Lehman
Maria Lehman, P.E., F.ASCE, ENV SP, is U.S. Infrastructure Lead for GHD. She is the past president of the ASCE and currently serves as vice chair of President Biden’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council; email: Maria.Lehman@ghd.com.
The post Engineering the Future: Streamlined Contract Documents Will Revolutionize Infrastructure Project Delivery first appeared on Informed Infrastructure.