One contractor is usually the cheaper risk, even when three separate bids add up to less money on paper. A facilities director juggling three campuses and a nine-week break is buying a finish date, not a unit price. The bid tab looks better with three specialists on it. The calendar rarely agrees. Ask the paving companies st louis mo districts rehire what goes wrong in week four, and you hear about the same spot every time, the strip between the repaved lot and the concrete walk that feeds it. Nobody bid it, so nobody owns it.
Here is the argument in one line. When asphalt, concrete and storm drainage sit under a single contract, the handoffs stop being anybody’s guess and one company owns the summer schedule. That is what a full-service paving contractor with four decades of commercial and public works work behind it is actually selling, and it is generally worth more to a district than a small price spread on the asphalt line. Whether the trade is worth making for you depends on how tight your break really is.
Three Trades Mean Three Separate Mobilizations
Every contractor on a job charges to show up. Mobilization covers the lowboy, the crew, the traffic control and the day nobody paves, and on a district-sized lot it lands somewhere in the range of $2,000 to $4,500 per trip depending on how far the equipment travels. Say a $250,000 allowance covers work at three campuses. One contractor sequences its own crews and moves once per site, so you pay for three mobilizations. Split the same scope among an asphalt company, a concrete company and a site drainage sub, and each of them mobilizes at each campus, which is nine trips instead of three. At $3,000 a trip, that gap is $18,000, a little over 7 percent of the allowance, spent on trucks arriving. Treat the arithmetic as an example scenario rather than a quote, but the direction of it does not change.
The money is the smaller half of this. Job after job, the piece nobody bid is the drainage inlet at the low corner of the lot, because the asphalt scope stopped at the grade and the concrete scope started at the walk. Somebody has to write a change order for it in the middle of July, and a July change order prices however the available subcontractor decides to price it. What usually turns up next is a two-day pause while the business office approves the number.
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Coordination Failures Show Up In Delay Data
Coordination is the delay nobody budgets for. A July 2026 construction delay roundup from OpenSpace pointed back to McKinsey’s review of more than 300 construction projects with contract values above $1 billion, which found average cost overruns of roughly 80 percent and schedule delays of around 50 percent. (No district is paving a billion-dollar campus, and I am not going to pretend the scale transfers cleanly.) Those figures still matter to a nine-week break, because the failure mode is the same at every size: the interface between two scopes is where the time goes, and a third contractor adds interfaces faster than it adds capacity. Three parties produce three ways to miss a Monday.
Among the paving companies st louis mo facilities teams keep on a short list, the ones carrying concrete and drainage in-house are there for exactly that reason. A district two counties over learned why in 2024, the plain way. It let asphalt, concrete and storm work as three contracts to save about $9,000, then lost eleven days when the concrete crew could not pour the dumpster pad until somebody regraded an approach that sat in no one’s scope. Buses came back to a coned-off service drive for the first week of school.
Single Accountability Protects The Summer Schedule
Sequencing is the entire product inside a summer window. One contractor can pour the dumpster pad while the mill crew works the far lot, then bring the paver back to tie in the approach that same week, because both crews answer to one superintendent. One contract means one phone call when the schedule slips and nobody else to blame. Three contracts hand you three schedules that were each honest the day they were written and are each now waiting on someone else.
Ask for the sequence before you ask for the price. A bidder who can hand you a week-by-week plan naming which lot is closed when, and who owns the drainage inlet, has thought about your nine weeks harder than the low number did. How districts are allowed to package scopes varies by state and by local policy, so check with your business office before assuming a single combined contract is even on the table. Then weigh the spread you would save against eleven days in August that no amount of money buys back.
