I can buy the material for a mile of 30 foot tall steel plate fencing like one of the sample walls I saw, including concrete and rebar for about six to eight million dollars and that’s a bit generous on the concrete but what the hell, it’s a govt. job. I’ve put up enough structural steel buildings and highway bridges and done enough industrial concrete to have a pretty darn good idea what all goes into that fence. To go even more generous on materials and govt. red tape let’s double that with a good cushion for profit and say twenty million for materials. That is very realistic.
An entire two lane interstate highway with a raised bed costs about thirty million dollars per mile which seems to me a similar volume of site work. But it’s the govt. so I’ll double it to sixty million a mile for site work. That brings us to eighty million a mile for materials, labor and machinery.
Oh hell, let’s double that just for fun because we know that’s what the contractors will do and rightfully so when the federal govt. is involved, they are almost impossible to work for on big projects and we are still at only 160 million dollars per mile and that is a friggin ripoff, but that’s what we’ll get in the real world.
Land acquisition is what we are left with and even if they took an entire mile wide swath you can’t get over 25 million per mile and that is for suburban residential prices.
185 million dollars a mile at total ripoff rates is about what I can come up with LOL and I do have some expertise in the field. I wouldn’t call it right up my alley, but I could run a job like that, I do have the requisite experience. The first mile costs the most of course, but not eight times as much at the rest of them. It’s a ripoff of such grand proportions as to boggle the mind of even the most dishonest of contractors.
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