Northwest Public-Works Bid Digest: Week of October 26, 2026

This is our weekly new-and-changed update for Northwest electrical and utility contractors. The short version this week: Mason County PUD No. 1 opened a second field job — the Lilliwaup Bay utility relocation, a bore-heavy underground rebuild with a mandatory pre-bid this Tuesday — and its Eldon-to-Duckabush rebuild picked up Addendum 2. Six bids are open now, three of them closing this week. Every open bid we track lives on the board at deadfront.ai/bids/open — this post just covers what moved since last Monday.

New this week

Lilliwaup Bay Utility Relocation — Mason County PUD No. 1 (Lilliwaup, WA). Sealed bids are due at the District office in Shelton before 12:00 PM PT on Tuesday, November 17, 2026, with a Zoom bid opening at 12:15. There's a MANDATORY pre-bid job show on Tuesday, October 27 at 9:00 AM PT — meet at the PUD 1 board room first, then drive to the site — so if you want this one, that walk-through is tomorrow and you can't bid without it. The work is an underground power-and-telecom relocation in Lilliwaup: a directional bore under Lilliwaup Bay, a Highway 101 crossing bore, larger-capacity cable pulled into new conduit, and a short overhead section at the Lilliwaup bridge rebuilt ahead of an eventual bridge replacement. Source.

Worth checking: the engineer's estimate is $750,000, bid security is 5% (bid bond or certified/cashier's check), and it's a Washington prevailing-wage job carrying a payment-and-performance bond. The bore conduit is contractor-supplied while the stick conduit is PUD-provided, and the bid form breaks out rock-bore adders separately — so your number turns on how the geotechnical report reads and whether you hit rock on the (3) 3" and (2) 2" runs. Addendum questions close November 10. It's the only new solicitation we could verify on an owner's own page this week; we ran the usual WA, OR, ID, and MT portals and agency pages — PUDs, electric co-ops, municipal utilities, cities, ports, and counties — and nothing else matching line, substation, or install work had a live future due date we could stand behind on the source site.

Changed

• Eldon to Duckabush Overhead Rebuild — Mason County PUD No. 1: the package moved from Addendum 1 only to Addendum 2. Addendum 2 and an updated bid form posted October 19, and Appendices 1, 2a, 2b, 3, 4, 5, and 7 were reposted October 21. The due date holds at October 30, 2026, 10:00 AM PT. Pull the current bid form and Addendum 2 before you finish pricing, since the whole appendix set changed. The mandatory October 6 job show is long past, so this one is closed to any shop that didn't attend. Source.

No other open bid changed this week — same due dates, same scopes, no cancellations.

Still open

Three bids close this week — the Cowlitz conductor and switchgear buys and the Eldon-to-Duckabush rebuild — and the Eldon job's mandatory pre-bid has already passed, so of those three only the two Cowlitz supply contracts are still open to new bidders. The two transformer packages and the switchgear buy are supply contracts where the technical spec, delivery date, and any capitalized-loss evaluation drive the number more than crew rates; Lilliwaup Bay is the field job now carrying the clock, and its mandatory walk-through is tomorrow. Dates above were verified against each owner's own solicitation page the day we published, but addenda move targets — confirm the current due date and any pre-bid requirement on the source page before you build your bid.

Eldon to Duckabush Overhead Rebuild: Full AI brief → https://www.deadfront.ai/bids/mason-pud-eldon-duckabush-reconductor

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If you're bidding one of these, we can turn the solicitation into a full AI bid brief — bonds, prevailing wage, owner-furnished equipment, submittal windows, and the rest — at deadfront.ai; see real example briefs for how they read.