September 17, 2026
What On-Call Task Orders Teach That Other Projects May Not
On-call contracting and the power of doing it again, one task order at a time.
Article by Dave Kennedy, Area Manager
There's a version of construction experience measured by the size of the project and the years spent building it. But in the case of an on-call contract, experience comes from something else: a wide view across multiple facets and phases of a transit system’s lifecycle, built one task order at a time.
Over the past 10 years, we've completed more than 600 maintenance and emergency task orders, ranging from $5,000 to $5 million, with crews and equipment positioned across the U.S. to mobilize fast when a client needs it.
Drainage improvements at the Trinity Railway Express (TRE) Equipement Maintenance Facility in Irving, Texas
On-call contracts provide construction or maintenance services on an as-needed basis. The scope isn't fully known at the time of award. It gets assigned later, one task order at a time, often as a way to keep a given asset in a state of good repair over time rather than fix it once and move on.
Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) built its current on-call program because the old model couldn't keep up. DART used to draw from a small pool of pre-approved contractors under a low-bid structure, capped at $250,000 per project. That worked for routine maintenance, but anything over the cap, or anything requiring rapid mobilization, joint scoping with subject matter experts, or a more creative solution, often got sidelined.
Facing delayed work with few ways to move it forward, DART looked at how other agencies handled the same problem, including the Utah Transit Authority and Stacy Witbeck, and built the Major On-Call Construction Program: $99.5 million allocated over five years, three contractors selected on qualifications, and a scope broad enough to cover systems, facilities, and general civil work. Each task order was scoped, priced, negotiated, executed, and closed out on its own. Then, the next one began. This on-call contract model is what makes over 600 maintenance and emergency tasks possible across the country in a decade.
Concrete repairs and epoxy injection work on DART light rail bridge piers, abutments, and retaining walls
The short interval between task orders means a lesson from one job can change the outcome of the next.
One example is a bus stop repair program under that DART contract. We started with an existing design and worked through the first group of repairs. Along the way, we found ways to improve the approach while maintaining quality. When the next group of stops came up, we applied what we'd learned, and by the end, we'd shaped a repair and replacement plan DART can use the next time this work comes up, whether that's in 10 years or 30.
Such continuity is what state of good repair actually requires: infrastructure that performs as designed, poses no unacceptable safety risk, and stays current on maintenance. Open-book pricing, daily coordination, and early scope discussions are what keep that condition maintained over time rather than achieved once and left to slip. Alisha Adaway, a Project Manager for Facilities & Systems Engineering at DART, has made a related case to other agencies managing aging capital assets: Think in programs, not one-offs, and use on-call or IDIQ contract vehicles to pre-approve standards and compress cycle time.
I think about my own career, which started in document control, learning submittals and contract procedures, with exposure to scheduling and quantity tracking coming later. It took years before I saw how those phases connected into one process instead of separate contracts. That's the pace of a major project: each phase arrives on its own timeline, and the connections between them surface slowly, if at all. Engineers on our on-call contracts see submittals, scheduling, and quantity tracking on the same task order instead of years apart, and by their third or fourth one, they're catching a scheduling conflict before it reaches the client instead of hearing about it after the fact. That compressed cycle is also how you develop people. Because these jobs are smaller and faster, newer team members can own a task order end to end, estimating through closeout, rather than holding a narrow slice of a multi-year project while the full-lifecycle view takes a career to accumulate.
Dave Kennedy in Dallas, Texas
Major projects offer the experience of carrying complex work across years. On-call contracts offer something different: the power of quick-turn complex work, almost as if you're keeping watch over something, and you know exactly what it needs because you were there the last time it needed something too.
The system keeps changing. On-call work is how you keep up with it.