Bid, grant and utility compliance
Everyone will advise you. Nobody else will write it.
The free help around here is real and it is good. It stops at the same line every time: research, advice, review, referral. Not one of them hands you the finished document, submitted, on the deadline, with somebody standing up at the meeting to answer questions about it.
That is the whole job here. We read the solicitation, the notice of funding, or the board order the way the people scoring it will read it, and then we produce the thing they are waiting on. Small contractors bidding public work. Nonprofits and cities chasing grants. Water and sewer systems trying to stay out of the Comptroller's file. Flat fees, published on this site, because you should not have to sit through a sales call to find out what something costs.
Three desks, one skill
Pick the door that fits.
Reading a long official document and turning it into a checklist of every obligation is the same job whether it is an invitation to bid, a notice of funding opportunity or an order from the Board of Utility Regulation. What happens after that is where they part company, so we keep them separate.
The Bid Desk
Contractors and small firms
You are bidding state, county, city, school district or utility district work and the paperwork is where it hurts. We build the compliance matrix, keep the addenda straight, score your draft the way the committee will, and write the response when you want it written.
- Compliance review before you hit submit
- Shred and an honest bid or no-bid read
- Red team scoring on a draft you wrote
- Full proposal response, flat fee
From $500 for a compliance review to $25,000 for a large full response. Every price is on the page.
See the Bid DeskThe Grant Desk
Nonprofits, cities, counties, districts
Grant deadlines are published a year ahead, which means the work can be planned instead of panicked over. We build the calendar, write the application, and stay on for the reporting and the drawdowns after the award lands.
- Prospect research on funders you can actually win
- Foundation and federal applications
- CDBG and infrastructure applications for local government
- Post-award administration, which is the part nobody wants
From $500 for prospect research to $10,000 for a municipal infrastructure application. Administration priced monthly.
See the Grant DeskThe Utility Desk
Water and sewer systems
Your file with the state decides whether you get referred and whether you qualify for funding. We keep it current, and when something has already gone wrong we build the document the Board asked for.
- Readiness Review of your file as the state reads it
- Water loss audits and correction plans
- Lead service line inventories before the 2027 deadline
- Monthly compliance retainer, priced by connections
Retainers from $700 a month by system size. Projects from $2,500. Every price is on the page.
See the Utility DeskThe reason this work exists
Compliance is scored before quality is.
Public procurement is not a beauty contest. Before an evaluator reads a word of your approach, a purchasing officer runs your submission against a responsiveness checklist. Fail any line on it and the package is set aside unopened, no matter how good the work inside would have been.
The same thing happens to a utility, only slower and more quietly. A state agency keeps a file on your system, and every year it collects an audit, an information report, a water loss figure, training hours, a map and an emergency plan. Nobody calls to tell you the file has gone stale. You find out when a referral letter arrives, or when a funding application stalls because the scorecard is short a document. Different regulator, same failure: the paperwork decided the outcome before anybody looked at the work.
The things that actually end bids:
- Submitted after the deadline, by any margin
- A required form missing or unsigned
- A notarization left blank
- An addendum never acknowledged
- Price appearing in the technical volume
- Page or format limits exceeded
- A mandatory pre-bid meeting missed
- A minimum qualification not documented
- State or federal registration lapsed
- Bid bond wrong in form or amount
- Files named or packaged against instruction
- References that do not match the stated scope
And the things that put a utility in front of the Board:
- Two consecutive years of decrease in net position
- Negative unrestricted net position
- Audits two years delinquent
- Water loss above forty percent
- Unrestricted cash well under fifteen percent of expenditures
- A debt default or a covenant breach
- Board training hours not met
- Transfers out of the utility fund that should not have happened
None of that is about writing. All of it is about somebody reading the document twice, on purpose, with a list.
That is most of what we do, and it is why the smallest thing we sell costs $500 instead of $5,000. You do not have to hand us the whole proposal to get value out of us. Hand us the one you already wrote and let us find what is going to get it thrown out.
Before you call anyone else
What we will not do, and why.
Some of these cost us money. All of them protect you, and a firm that will not tell you where its limits are has not thought about them.
- FEE We will never work for a percentage of what you win. Contingent fees on federal contracts are prohibited under FAR Subpart 3.4, and FAR 52.203-5 lets the government void the contract and take the fee back. You are the one who signs that covenant, so a success fee puts the exposure on you. On the grant side it is unallowable under 2 CFR 200 and an ethics violation besides. On a rate study, Arkansas makes us assure the state in writing that our fee does not depend on where the rates land. Flat fees, always.
- COI We will never take two clients on the same solicitation. Not with a firewall and not with different writers, because by then we have seen somebody's pricing strategy. We ask for the solicitation number before you tell us anything substantive, and we keep a conflict register. The same rule applies to a merger study: never both systems, and never a system and the one it is being merged with. If you call second, we will tell you so.
- ENG We are not engineers and we will not pretend the line is blurry. We build the asset register, the water balance, the financial model and the plan around them. Condition assessments and capital plans that turn on engineering judgment go to a licensed engineer who signs for them. Kentucky's Commission has ordered a professional engineering firm for capital plans in water loss cases, and it is right to. We do the data and the money.
- AUD We are not auditors and a review is not an audit. A Readiness Review reads the records you give us and tells you what they say. It is not an audit, not an engineering evaluation, not a legal opinion, and it does not certify that you comply with anything. Where a document has to be certified by a CPA before a board can rely on it, a CPA certifies it.
- ADV We will not call a contracting officer or program officer on your behalf. Procedural questions are fine and we will help you frame them. Advocating for an award is where proposal assistance turns into lobbying, and it is not what you hired us for.
- FACT We will not write a past performance reference you have not confirmed. Contract values, dates, agency names, personnel credentials, certifications, licensure. Every one of those comes from you and you attest to it in writing. A wrong number in that section is a misrepresentation to a government entity, and the consequences run all the way to debarment.
- BID We will tell you to skip a bid you cannot win. This county is small and it talks. Two losses attributed to us and we are finished here, so our incentive and yours point the same direction. If the incumbent is strong, the qualifications do not fit, or the scoring rewards something you do not have, we would rather say so and keep the relationship.
Straight answer
The practice is new. Here is what that means for you.
Reelfoot Compliance Group, LLC is a young firm and we are not going to pretend otherwise by putting stock photos of a conference room on this page. What is here is twenty years of owning and running businesses and consulting for people running theirs, which is mostly the work of reading a contract for what it actually obligates you to do, and a process that turns a two hundred page document into a compliance matrix in a fraction of the time it takes by hand.
What that buys you is a price the national shops cannot touch and direct attention on your file. What it costs you is a reference list we are still building. So here is the fair trade:
Standing offer
Send us a solicitation you are thinking about, or one you already lost. We will read it and send back a one page honest read on whether it was worth bidding and where the points were. No charge, no obligation, and nothing gets pitched inside it. If the work is any good you will know it, and if it is not you have lost an email.
Running a water or sewer system? The equivalent is the Readiness Review, and it is the one thing on this site we do charge for up front, because it takes ten days and it reads your whole file. The fee comes back off anything you hire us for afterward.