1. Go to https://www.for.gov.bc.ca/bcts/
2. Go into the "Business Area" that you're interested in (green tab, fourth from right).
3. Go to "Contract Opportunities" (left side, sixth item down the list).
4. Click on "Tender Opening Records" (green underlined link at bottom of main text on page).
5. Click on the link for the folder for the relevant fiscal year (blue underlined text link). By the way, you can check the dates on the left, if appropriate, to see if there have been any recent updates.
6. Click on the appropriate PDF that you want to see.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm just starting a thread now in anticipation of the Fall 2014 viewing/bidding season starting in roughly a month.
As always, planters (and contractors) would like to see higher prices for work done. Prices have risen since a bottom a few years ago, after the global economic problems that started in 2007, but they have not yet recovered to the full levels that we would all like to see. In the meantime, inflation has been creeping upward. Even if tree prices were to match their historical highs, the costs of being a tree planter or of running a planting company have climbed in the interim. If you're a planter, you're paying higher prices for transportation to the job site, gear, food on days off, laundry, and of course your annual living expenses outside of the planting world have also climbed. If you're a contractor, you're seeing higher costs for expenses such as wages, fuel, vehicles, food, and dozens of other critical items. So in one respect, planters and contractors are very much united ... we all need to see higher prices.
I took a look at the bid prices from the fall of 2011, two years ago. I was studying them and I noticed an interesting trend. As time passed throughout the viewing season, prices climbed. See the two graphs below (the trend was significantly more noticeable in the northern part of BC):
What can we all learn from this? Well, the lesson that I took away is that contractors are more cut-throat in their bidding on the first bids. This makes sense ... none of them have won any public-bid contracts yet. They all have the fear that they're not going to get enough work.
DO NOT LISTEN TO THE FEAR.
Seriously, wouldn't it be great if all contractors sat back and exercised a bit of restraint about those first couple bids that are opened? You've got lots of time later in the season to chase after other contracts. But if EVERY contractor exercised some restraint at the start of bidding, it would send a reassuring message through the industry, that prices CAN be higher.
Incidentally, remember that the data set I'm using above is from a time 24 months ago when conditions in the industry were different than they are now. There's a lot more work out there now, which is great, because contractors CAN afford to exercise restraint. In 2011, everyone was afraid that they wouldn't have any work. We know this year that there is a lot of work out there.
Anyway, the message is that if you're a contractor who is reading this, please think about what I've said. You hold your fate in your own hands. It would be great if the first public bids that were opened were higher than the bids last year, and you could all sit back for a few minutes and think, "Hey, 2014 could turn out to be a great year for us." You don't have to chase volumes if you're winning bids at profitable contribution margins.
For reference, here's the data set that I used to make the above graphs. I made these graphs ages ago, but forgot to post them here last fall. Lines shaded in orange are southern contracts.
