Insight
For anyone who's actually run a site, the project doesn't start when the first floor of structure goes up. It starts months earlier and the work that happens before vertical construction defines whether the rest of the build is a snowball of expenses or a smooth run.
This is a practical breakdown of what civil site servicing actually involves, written from the perspective of the people who'd rather not get a 9 PM call about a watermain hit. It's aimed at GCs, project managers, developers earlier in their careers, and anyone who needs a working mental model of the work that happens between "shovels in the ground" and "ready for foundations."
What "site servicing" actually means
Site servicing is the umbrella term for the civil work that prepares raw land, or a demolished site, for construction. It includes the excavation, grading, underground utilities, drainage, and surface preparation that have to be in place before any structural work begins.
On a commercial or multi-residential project, site servicing usually breaks down into five overlapping workstreams.
1. Excavation and demolition
If there's an existing structure, it comes down first. Demolition involves utility disconnects, hazardous material abatement (asbestos, lead, PCBs in older buildings), salvage where required, and controlled tear-down that doesn't damage adjacent properties.
After demolition, excavation goes to the depth required for the foundations, parking levels, and any underground services. The volume of soil moved on a typical mid-size commercial site is much larger than people expect at often 20,000+ cubic metres for an underground parking structure, all of which has to be hauled off-site to receiving sites. It's important those sites aren't an hour away.
2. Shoring and deep excavation support
The deeper the excavation, the more the surrounding soil wants to collapse into the hole. Shoring is the temporary structural system: soldier piles, secant walls, sheet piling, soil nails, tie-backs. That holds the excavation walls in place while foundation work happens.
Shoring wrong can burn weeks of a schedule. Get the design right and it's like you never did anything. Get it wrong and you're dealing with neighbour complaints, settlement monitoring alerts, or in the worst cases, a stop-work order while the structural engineer figures out what to do next.
Key inputs to a shoring plan:
Soil conditions (from the geotechnical report)
Excavation depth and footprint
Proximity to adjacent buildings, roads, and underground utilities
Groundwater table and dewatering requirements
Vibration limits from municipal bylaws or heritage protections
3. Sewer, watermain, and storm infrastructure
This is the underground services work including the pipes that connect the building to the municipal network. There are three primary streams:
Sanitary sewer: wastewater out
Watermain: potable water in
Storm sewer: surface drainage out
Each has separate design requirements, separate inspection regimes, and separate failure modes. A watermain installed without proper bedding compaction will move over winter as the joints will separate, and you'll find out about it when it leaks. A storm system that doesn't drain to design grade will pond, freeze, and crack pavement above it.
This is also the workstream most likely to interact with existing municipal infrastructure. That being locates, road cuts, traffic management plans, and inspection windows that often dictate the critical path of the whole project.
4. Grading and site preparation
Once services are in, the site has to be graded to drain water away from the building, support the proposed surface treatments (asphalt, concrete, landscaping), and meet the elevations on the civil drawings. Grading is where the topographic survey, the architect's site plan, the civil engineer's grading plan, and the landscape architect's plan all have to agree. Pro-tip: they often don't, which is why early-stage grading checks save you from a re-grade later.
5. Asphalt paving and milling
For projects with parking lots, internal roads, or loading areas, asphalt is one of the last civil items before the site is functionally complete. Milling: removing the top layer of existing asphalt comes into play on renovation projects, partial repairs, and any site where the existing surface stays in place but needs to tie into new work.
Two details that matter more than they seem:
Base preparation. Asphalt is only as good as what's underneath it. A 2-inch overlay on a failed base will give you problems in 18 months. You don't want to worry about it for at least 15 years.
Drainage. Asphalt that ponds water freezes in winter, cracks, and starts the failure cycle. Grade is everything.
How the workstreams sequence
In broad terms, the order is: demolition → excavation → shoring → underground services → backfill → grading → surface. In practice, these overlap heavily. Underground services often start while shoring is still being installed in another section of the site. Backfill happens in lifts as services go in, not in a single pass at the end.
The handoff that most often goes wrong is between site servicing and the structural contractor starting foundations. If the bottom of excavation isn't to grade, isn't compacted, or has water sitting in it, the foundation crew shows up to a site they can't work on while you're stuck paying crew time for the overlap.
What to look for in a civil partner
A few criteria that separate civil contractors who reduce project risk from ones who add to it:
Real geotechnical literacy. Can they read the report, ask intelligent questions, and flag issues before they become RFIs?
Inspection coordination. Municipal inspections often have narrow windows. A civil contractor who manages those windows actively, not reactively, saves weeks on a typical project.
Equipment depth. Owning the equipment instead of subbing it out reduces schedule risk significantly when something breaks or a window opens up unexpectedly.
Track record on similar scope. A contractor who's done 30 mid-rise sites with similar soil and similar municipal regimes will surface fewer surprises than one moving into the segment.
What this looks like with RICI
RICI CON handles civil site servicing across Ontario including excavation, shoring, sewer/watermain/storm, grading, and asphalt. This offering is the front-end of the broader RICI Group ecosystme that continues into property maintenance and building envelope post-construction.
If you want a civil partner for the next project you're scoping, let us know so we can get it right before it goes wrong.