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Randall A Chapple, AIA, SE, CCS, LEED AP
Senior Member
Username: rachapple

Post Number: 39
Registered: 12-2005
Posted on Thursday, December 09, 2010 - 12:36 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post

For a project that will include commissioning, is there an issue with including the Owner's Project Requirements and the Basis of Design in the Project Manual? These would be of reference and would not be part of the Contract Documents. Per Masterspec evaluations they should not be part of the Contract Documents.
Mark Gilligan SE,
Senior Member
Username: mark_gilligan

Post Number: 344
Registered: 10-2007
Posted on Thursday, December 09, 2010 - 01:16 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post

If the contractor does not have a specific need for that information then the answer should be no.
Richard A. Rosen, CSI, CCS, AIA
Senior Member
Username: rarosen

Post Number: 89
Registered: 08-2006


Posted on Thursday, December 09, 2010 - 02:26 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post

If the project will be LEED certified I beleive the OPR and BOD are required in order to confirm compliance with project goals during the commissioning process. I also believe the information in the OPR and BOD would also help the contractors in understanding the project goals and performing their work in conformance with these goals. Therefore I would include them as information available to bidders or as an informational appendix.
John Bunzick, CCS, CCCA, LEED AP
Senior Member
Username: bunzick

Post Number: 1280
Registered: 03-2002
Posted on Thursday, December 09, 2010 - 03:09 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post

Just because LEED requires something does not mean that it must be explicitly included in the Contract Documents.
Richard A. Rosen, CSI, CCS, AIA
Senior Member
Username: rarosen

Post Number: 90
Registered: 08-2006


Posted on Thursday, December 09, 2010 - 03:56 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post

Including information available to bidders in the project manual as an appendix is specifically excluded from the Contract Documents just as providing bidders a copy of the geotechnical report bound into the project manual. The information provided by these documents is helpful to all parties in meeting the goals and expectations of the project whether LEED or not.
(Unregistered Guest)
Unregistered guest
Posted on Thursday, December 09, 2010 - 06:46 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post

The "goals and expectations" should be translated into contract requirements and included in the contract documents. That's the job of the architect and specifier, not the contractor.

Comparing the OPR and BOD to the contract documents is the job of the commissioning agent, not the contractor.

If the architect, specifier, and commissioning agent are doing their jobs, the contractor has no need of these documents. If they aren't doing their jobs, providing the documents to the contractor might enable them to identify a problem, but doesn't give them any tools to fix it.

Call me cynical, but I've seen too many boilerplate OPRs and BODs that are obviously done just to check off the box to certify that they've been completed. I'd never seriously consider including those in the contract documents, even just for reference.
Anne Whitacre, FCSI CCS
Senior Member
Username: awhitacre

Post Number: 1076
Registered: 07-2002


Posted on Friday, December 10, 2010 - 02:45 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post

Unregistered guest has it correctly. The Owner's requirements need to be attainable and measureable before they can be translated into contract requirements; they also need to be enforceable. I've worked with a lot of owners whose requirements are so vague, unenforceable, and laughable, that a 5 page document nets you two lines of text. (of course, explaining to the owner that their "requirements" can't be required is a whole other issue.
As for the basis of design: these should be taken care of in either the various spec sections as attainable requirments (and including the engineering sections) or left out as just so much fluff.
I often recommend to Owners that if they have vague feel-good "requirements" that they have a pre-bid meeting that is mandatory and state their intentions at that meeting. If the Owner is not willing to do that, (or not willing to make the meeting mandatory) then we all know just how important those "requirements" are.
J. Peter Jordan (Unregistered Guest)
Unregistered guest
Posted on Friday, December 10, 2010 - 03:10 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post

Including "Information Available to Bidders" in the Project Manual seems to be a regional preference. Most of my clients (design professionals) want to see the investigation and recommendations from the Owner's geotechnical consultant included. I do this with some text identifying the report and specifically stating that it is not a part of the Contract Documents. For some projects, this document references the report without including it. I have made modifications to the text and used it to include "for reference" for physicist reports (for radiation-generating equipment), wind studies, acoustical reports, and energy studies. When available, I have sometimes included the BOD as an appendix to the Division 01 Section on comissioning.

I am in complete agreement that this information should not be a part of the Contract Documents (although some Owners do this), I take the stand that having more information is a good thing. Where there are incomplete, incorrect, or conflicting interpretations by the design professional, having this means there may be a way to get it right before everthing goes wrong.
ken hercenberg
Senior Member
Username: khercenberg

Post Number: 75
Registered: 12-2006
Posted on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 - 12:48 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post

Seems to me that MF95 had a clever little thing called "Systems and Assemblies" included as a sort of preamble to the Project Manual that few people actually seemed to use. I think it was another case of CSI being ahead of the times. Now with Revit using UniFormat as the basis for naming its families, I think there should be a mechanism for listing the 'Systems and Assemblies' in UniFormat with corresponding MF keynotes. Frankly it seems to me that with all of our technological breakthroughs it's pretty disappointing that we still can't just press a button and get these as holistic reports.

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