Government & civic
with the details that matter.
Civic buildings, schools, hospitals, transit, and historic fabric. We pair the capture method to the way your team will use the result.
What needs to be
measured first?
Public work brings procurement rules, badging, and records requirements. We scope those explicitly, and we are comfortable working as a subconsultant to an A/E team on public bids.
Every facility has a different risk surface. We start with access, geometry density, and the decision the capture needs to unlock — then choose between laser scanning, drone mapping, or both.
Talk through a scope- Schools
- Courthouses
- Public works
- Transit barns
- Historic fabric
- Procurement
Documenting a public building that never closes
Civic buildings are usually older than their drawings, still in daily public use, and about to be renovated with money that has a spending deadline attached. The capture sequence is built around who is in the building at what hour, because access — not geometry — is what sets the schedule.
Public floors and circulation
Lobbies, service counters, courtrooms, council chambers, corridors, and stairs, with door clear widths, landing dimensions, and level changes recorded properly. Accessibility upgrades live or die on these numbers, and a scan captures them without a tape measure in front of the public.
Above the ceiling
The plenum in a mid-century civic building is where the surprises are: original plaster ceilings above a later grid, ductwork threaded around structure, and generations of abandoned conduit. Access here is limited and worth planning around specific accessible tiles rather than assuming free rein.
Mechanical, boiler, and electrical rooms
Boiler rooms, air handling spaces, switchgear, and the vertical chases connecting them. In buildings that have been re-serviced three times, these rooms are the constraint on every mechanical upgrade the capital plan contains.
Envelope and historic fabric
Cornices, stone and terracotta detail, window openings, cupolas, and any ornament a restoration will have to replicate. This is geometry that cannot be redrawn from memory once scaffolding, repair, or removal has touched it.
Yards, garages, and roofs
Public works garages, salt sheds, fuel islands, transit maintenance bays, and the roofs above all of them. Fleet and maintenance buildings have their own dimensional problems — bay depth, door height, and lift pit position — that rarely appear on any drawing at all.
Badging, escorts, and the public calendar
Public buildings run to a calendar that is not negotiable. Courtrooms have a docket, council chambers have meeting nights, and a service counter cannot be closed because a survey crew arrived. Most civic work therefore happens in the evening, at a weekend, or during a recess, with an escort from facilities and badging arranged in advance. Security screening, certificates of insurance, and building access procedures are scoped as part of the job rather than discovered on the first morning.
Some public buildings restrict what may be recorded at all. Detention areas, evidence storage, dispatch and emergency operations centers, and parts of public safety facilities are commonly excluded, and imagery from those spaces may be subject to handling rules written into the contract. We would rather have those boundaries stated in the scope than have a crew turned away at a door, and any excluded area is listed explicitly in the coverage note so the design team knows it was a decision rather than an oversight.
More on how this works in practice is on our guide to scanning without a shutdown.
Deliverables that satisfy a procurement file
Public work has a second audience beyond the design team: the file itself. Deliverables that can be reviewed, archived, and referenced by whoever inherits the project matter as much as the geometry inside them.
| The decision | What to ask for | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Bond or capital renovation design | Point cloud plus existing conditions drawings | Architects need measurable plans, sections, and elevations to start work; the cloud backs up every dimension on them. |
| Coordinated renovation with heavy MEP scope | Revit or IFC model including above-ceiling services | Where new ductwork and conduit fit is a three-dimensional argument, and it needs modeled systems to settle it. |
| Restoration of historic fabric | High-density cloud and measured elevations | Ornament and profiles have to be recorded as they are, not idealized into what the original drawing intended. |
| Facilities and asset records | Registered cloud plus a documented QA report | The department that maintains the building keeps using this long after the project that paid for it closes. |
Formats and what each one is good for are covered on the deliverables page.
Where public projects lose time
- Scoping by square footage — A civic building priced on floor area and captured under escort behaves nothing like a warehouse of the same size. Escort availability, room-by-room permission, and evening-only access are what determine the days on site, and a scope that ignores them is a scope that will change.
- Forgetting the parts below and between — Tunnels, crawl spaces, attics, and connecting passages between adjacent municipal buildings carry services that every renovation touches. They are rarely on a drawing, frequently need a permit to enter, and are the single most common omission from a civic scope.
- Assuming ceilings can be opened — In buildings of a certain age, lifting a ceiling tile or opening a chase is a regulated activity, not a convenience. Above-ceiling capture has to be planned around the tiles that may legitimately be moved, and where that limits coverage, the limitation belongs in the report.
- Treating historic detail as repeatable — Hand-built ornament is not identical bay to bay, and drawings that show it as repeating are describing an intention rather than a building. Restoration scopes drawn from those drawings run into trouble the moment fabrication starts.
What agencies and their A/E teams ask
Can you work as a subconsultant on a public bid?
Yes. A good deal of public work reaches us through the architect or engineer holding the prime contract, and we are comfortable working to their scope, their deliverable specification, and their schedule. What we need early is the deliverable language from the RFP, because it usually dictates formats and drawing content more tightly than the design team's own preference would.
Our RFP specifies a BIM deliverable. Can you meet it?
Send the specification before the proposal rather than after. Public BIM requirements vary widely in what they ask for — level of development, which systems are modeled, naming conventions, and what has to be delivered alongside the model — and those choices drive the modeling effort far more than building size does.
Can the building stay open while you work?
Usually. The crew works around the public calendar, generally in the evening or at a weekend, with an escort. Where a space has to be captured during operating hours, setups are short and the equipment occupies about the footprint of a person, so a counter or corridor is only affected for a few minutes at a time.
What about areas we cannot let you record?
State them in the scope and they are excluded, with the exclusion written into the coverage note so nobody downstream mistakes a restricted area for an oversight. Detention space, evidence storage, and emergency operations areas are commonly carved out, and contract terms on data handling and storage are scoped the same way.
Pair TLS interiors with drone exteriors for one coordinate story.
Roof, yard, tanks, structures, and the building envelope can live in the same project handoff when the control is planned upfront.
See existing conditionsMake the invisible
measurable.
Tell us what is inside, outside, and on the line. We will help you scope the capture and the handoff — in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut.
Request a scan quote