Southern Contracting Company

Southern Contracting Company is an electrical and general engineering contractor founded in 1963 and headquartered in San Marcos, in north San Diego County. It handles power systems, instrumentation, underground utilities and high-voltage overhead and underground distribution, including transformers and substations. Much of its industrial and public works client base is water: wastewater and drinking water treatment plants and pump stations. That fits its newest job. Southern Contracting holds the electrical package at the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant, where PCL Construction’s revised $552 million award covers primary treatment, a 12-kV electrical building with switchgear and transformers, and related work over a 1,643-day schedule. Morley has the concrete package on the same job.

The company’s own history page reads as a record of how electrical contracting in San Diego County changed, decade by decade, and it is unusually specific.

The first job in 1963 was dry utility and electrical distribution for one of the first housing subdivisions in Rancho Bernardo. By the late 1960s the company had diversified into sewage treatment plants and water pumping stations, which is the root of the water and wastewater work it still does. The 1970s housing boom brought underground subdivision utilities and a working relationship with San Diego Gas and Electric, supplying qualified electricians and equipment, which opened the door to outside line construction.

In 1976 Kaiser Aetna approached the company about a new concept called design and build, or turnkey. Southern was awarded a Camp Pendleton-based project and completed 800 living units. By the late 1970s it had moved into industrial work, helping Union Oil build a 10 MW pilot geothermal plant, then winning a repeat sole-source contract for a second 10 MW plant at the Salton Sea.

In 1980 founder Richard W. McBride was instrumental in getting Senate Bill 48 signed into law, creating the “Applicant Installation” mechanism that moved control of underground and overhead utility installation and scheduling from the utilities to the developer. By the mid-1980s the company was retrofitting electrical infrastructure on almost every Navy base in San Diego.

The current industrial scope is deep: variable frequency drives, motor control centers, high, medium and low voltage switchgear, process logic control panels and instrumentation, SCADA and fiber optics, UPS systems, lighting, building automation and security, CCTV and access controls, medium and high voltage splicing and testing, battery energy storage systems, EV charging stations and co-generation facilities. The automation group adds custom UL508A control panels, panel engineering and design, PLC programming, AutoCAD and MicroStation loop drawing development, and field calibration and service support.

Representative projects include East County Advanced Water Purification, Encina Wastewater Authority and City of San Diego Pump Station 2.

The company reports a low EMR rate and runs a continuing safety training programme. The office is at 559 North Twin Oaks Valley Road, San Marcos, on (760) 744-0760.