Clearing subcontractor · Cuyahoga & Lake County, Ohio
Put a firm clearing number in the bid before you win the job.
BrushBoss is the forestry mulching sub that commercial and urban contractors call when standing brush is sitting between them and the dig. You send the parcel and the limits. You get a fixed per-acre figure that drops straight into your bid line — priced off the ground, not off a clock.
Based in Chagrin Falls. Working Cuyahoga County and Lake County, Ohio — private work only, for contractors, developers, owners, and grounds managers.
The number you can put in your bid
Clearing is the one line most bids guess at. A per-acre price turns the guess into a figure you can defend to an owner, a lender, or a project manager who wants to know where the allowance came from.
Hourly clearing quotes are unbiddable. An hourly rate tells you what the machine costs; it tells you nothing about what the job costs, because the variable you are exposed to — how long the growth takes to come down — sits entirely on your side of the contract. So you pad it. And the pad is either big enough to lose you the bid or small enough to eat your margin when the honeysuckle turns out to be twelve years thick instead of five.
We price the acre, not the hour. One fixed per-acre number, never hourly, quoted from aerial imagery and the parcel record before anyone has to stand on the site. Density and terrain set the rate, we put it in writing before anything moves, and it holds whether the work runs fast or slow.
Flat-ground forestry mulching runs $2,300 – $2,990 per acre, by how heavy the growth is. That range is the honest span across light regrowth and twelve-year thicket; the single fixed number for your parcel comes back with the quote. Ravine walls, lakefront bluffs, saturated bottoms, and sites where the only access is threaded between existing structures get scoped and quoted on their own — but they still come back as a number, not a rate card.
There is no minimum acreage and no minimum dollar amount. A fence line, a basin bank, or a half-acre remnant on an infill lot gets priced the same way a twenty-acre parcel does. Nothing is too small to quote.
Three things that matter when you are assembling a commercial bid:
- The clearing number is final before you submit. No allowance, no escalation clause, no "pending site conditions" asterisk that someone reads back to you in a change-order meeting.
- Disposal is inside the number. Mulched material stays on the ground as a surface layer. There is no trucking line, no roll-off, no tipping fee, and no second invoice arriving after the work is signed off.
- The scope is yours to define. We clear to your stakes, your flagging, your limits of disturbance, or a marked-up plan sheet. Trees you want standing stay standing, and we do not price or perform the work that follows ours.
Address plus limits
Parcel number or street address, and however you have the area defined — a survey, a site plan, an aerial with a line drawn on it, or a description over the phone.
Per-acre price in writing
We size the area, read the growth and the access, and come back with a fixed per-acre price and the acreage it applies to. That is the line for your bid.
Paperwork, then mobilize
If the job lands, we issue the COI naming your company as additional insured and a W-9 for your AP file, then schedule against your sequence.
Quoting a clearing scope costs you nothing whether or not you win the work. For the wider program behind this page, see BrushBoss commercial land clearing across Northeast Ohio.
Where a clearing line shows up in your scope
The trigger is usually the same: brush is standing in front of the work you are actually being paid for, and the machine that takes it down is the one machine you do not own or cannot spare an operator for. Hand us that piece.
The line everything else waits on
Infill parcels, assembled lots, redevelopment sites, and wooded remnants that have to be open before survey, geotech, or earthwork can be sequenced.
- Clear before layout so the surveyor can actually shoot the site
- A real acquisition-stage number instead of a placeholder allowance
- Selective clearing where a landscape buffer has to survive to occupancy
- Access lanes and haul-road corridors opened ahead of mobilization
Open ground before the dig
Site-work generals, utility and plumbing crews, septic installers, and pool builders who need the growth off before the trench, the tank, or the pad.
- Trench and lateral runs cleared to a workable corridor width
- Staging and laydown areas opened up on tight parcels
- Basin and swale banks mulched so the grader has a clean line
- No stumps hauled, no debris pile eating your laydown space
Acreage nobody can mow
Maintenance and design-build firms handed a back acre, a wood line, or a slope that is years past what a mower deck or a walk-behind can recover.
- Reclaim overgrown ground back to a mowable surface
- Bed lines, wood lines, and fence lines cut back to the property boundary
- Invasive thickets knocked down ahead of a planting or restoration phase
- Mulch layer left in place instead of bare, washable soil
The understory after the removal
You took the canopy. What is left is a field of saplings, whips, and brush that is not worth a bucket truck day or a chipper crew.
- Understory and regrowth mulched in a single pass
- Slash and brush handled without chipping and trucking it out
- Lot cleanup finished so you can close the job and move the crew
- Priced per acre so the sub line in your proposal is stable
A budget line, not a complaint
Apartment and condo communities, HOA and board-run properties, private campuses, medical and office parks, and cemetery grounds carrying the same acreage every year.
- Detention and retention basin banks cleared before they silt in behind brush
- Buffer strips and wood lines held at the line the site plan drew
- Vacant pads and outlots kept presentable between tenants
- Multi-property portfolios priced site by site in one report
Corridors and pads
Fence contractors, private solar developers, and specialty trades who need a clean running line before a single post goes in the ground.
- Fence line corridors cut straight and to a consistent width
- Array and pad areas opened ahead of racking or footings
- Property line and easement runs cleared for locate and layout
- Trails and private access paths mulched to a finished surface
What Cuyahoga and Lake County sites actually throw at you
These two counties are not open farm ground, and a clearing price written for open farm ground will not survive contact with them. Here is what we are pricing around.
Inner-ring access that will not take a wide load
Cuyahoga's built-out suburbs hand you infill parcels wedged between finished properties: one construction gate, a residential street for staging, overhead service drops, and a neighbor's driveway ten feet off your limit line. Tracked mulching equipment gets in through openings a dozer-and-truck operation cannot use, and it works without a debris pile that needs a lay-down area you do not have. We walk the access before we price it, so the access problem is a line in the quote instead of a surprise on mobilization morning.
Ravines, bluffs, and river-corridor slopes
The Chagrin and Rocky River valleys cut hard through eastern and western Cuyahoga, and Lake County's lakefront bluffs and Grand River corridor do the same thing again on the way to Erie. Steep, wooded side slopes are where dozing gets genuinely expensive and genuinely risky, because stripping vegetation off a grade in Northeast Ohio's rain leaves you with a soil-loss problem that outlives the job. Mulching leaves the root mat and the topsoil where they are and puts a fibrous layer over the surface. Steep work is scoped separately from flat ground and quoted on its own.
Nursery blocks, field edges, and abandoned rows
Lake County is Ohio's nursery belt, and Perry, Madison, Painesville and Kirtland are full of blocks that went past harvest, field edges walking in from the hedgerow, and old rows that need to come out before the ground turns over to something else. Row-grown stock, windbreaks, and volunteer growth between blocks all mulch cleanly, and the material stays on the field instead of being trucked off it. For growers and the contractors who work for them, that is a clearing cost with no disposal cost bolted onto the back of it.
Easements, laterals, and the strip nobody wants to price
Half the awkward clearing in these counties is a corridor: the utility easement crossing a client's parcel, the rear lot line the survey needs opened, the sanitary run, the gas lateral, the private drive that has closed to one lane of brush. These are the scopes that break hourly pricing, because they are long, narrow, and slow. Priced per acre with the corridor width defined up front, they become a normal line. We work to marked locates and stay inside the limits you flag.
Detention basins, buffers, and the site plan's promises
Apartment communities, condo associations, private campuses and office parks across both counties are carrying the same annual problem: the basin silts in behind a wall of brush, the treeline walks into the turf a foot a season, and the required buffer closes up until somebody complains at a board meeting. It is the same acreage every year and it is past what a mowing contract can take back. Priced now, it is a scheduled line on next year's grounds budget instead of an emergency vote.
Wet bottoms, clay, and a short window
Northeast Ohio clay does not drain, and the low ground on these parcels holds water well into spring. Low-ground-pressure tracked equipment operating on its own mulch mat works ground that wheeled machines would rut into a reclamation problem. It also means honest scheduling: frozen and dry are the good windows, saturated is not, and we will tell you which one your date is likely to land in rather than promising a week we cannot hold.
Forestry mulching vs. dozer-and-haul, line by line
Both methods end with open ground. They do not end with the same bid, the same schedule, or the same site to hand back. This is what changes between them.
| Factor | Forestry mulching | Dozer-and-haul |
|---|---|---|
| How it is priced | Fixed per acre, quoted in writing before mobilization. One number, one invoice. | Commonly a machine-and-operator rate, with disposal, trucking, and cleanup billed separately after the fact. |
| What drives the cost | Acreage, brush density, terrain, and access. All four are readable before work starts. | Machine hours plus debris volume — and debris volume is not knowable until the growth is already down. |
| Bid exposure | Sits on the contractor doing the clearing. The number you carry does not move. | Sits on you. Overruns, extra loads, and extra trips land in your column as change orders. |
| Debris and disposal | None to manage. Material is processed in place and left as a surface mulch layer. | Stumps, root balls, and slash must be piled, then burned or removed from the site. |
| Trucking and tipping | No haul-off, no roll-offs, no tipping fees, no truck traffic on the street. | Loads out by the truckload, priced by weight or volume, plus disposal-facility fees. |
| Time on site | Continuous single-pass clearing. Typically the shorter of the two on comparable ground. | Push, pile, load, and haul are sequential phases, and hauling continues after clearing stops. |
| Topsoil and soil structure | Topsoil and root mat stay intact. Nothing is stripped or exported. | Vegetation is removed with the topsoil layer it was growing in, which then has to be replaced or amended. |
| Erosion exposure | Low. The mulch layer breaks rainfall impact and slows sheet flow until cover re-establishes. | High. Bare, disturbed soil is exposed to every storm between clearing and stabilization. |
| Permits and approvals | No burn permit and no fire watch, because nothing is burned. Sediment-control obligations remain the site owner's. | Open burning requires permission where it is allowed at all, and hauling adds transport and disposal documentation. |
| Selective clearing | Practical. Specimen trees, buffer plantings, and screening rows can be worked around. | Difficult. Blade work is indiscriminate, and root damage extends past what the operator can see. |
| Fit for tight urban lots | Strong. One machine, one access point, no debris staging, no truck queue on a residential street. | Weak. Requires pile space, truck turnaround, and repeated street access on parcels that have none. |
| Condition at handoff | Trafficable mulched surface, ready for survey, layout, or the next trade. | Bare, disturbed grade that usually needs stabilization before the next trade is comfortable on it. |
Dozer-and-haul is still the right call when the ground itself has to be moved, when stumps must be physically extracted for footings, or when the finished elevation is changing. Mulching removes standing growth; it does not do earthwork. Tell us which one your scope actually needs and we will say so plainly.
Where we run in Cuyahoga and Lake County
Two counties, worked deliberately from a Chagrin Falls base that sits on the Cuyahoga side of the line and inside an easy run of Lake County. Short mobilizations, and an operator who knows which streets a trailer can actually turn on.
Cuyahoga County
Inner-ring redevelopment, infill parcels, river-valley slopes, apartment and campus grounds.
- Cleveland
- Lakewood
- Rocky River
- Westlake
- Bay Village
- Fairview Park
- North Olmsted
- Olmsted Falls
- Berea
- Middleburg Heights
- Strongsville
- North Royalton
- Broadview Heights
- Brecksville
- Independence
- Parma
- Parma Heights
- Seven Hills
- Brooklyn
- Brook Park
- Garfield Heights
- Maple Heights
- Bedford
- Bedford Heights
- Walton Hills
- Valley View
- Solon
- Glenwillow
- Orange Village
- Pepper Pike
- Moreland Hills
- Chagrin Falls
- Bentleyville
- Hunting Valley
- Gates Mills
- Mayfield Village
- Mayfield Heights
- Highland Heights
- Richmond Heights
- Lyndhurst
- South Euclid
- University Heights
- Beachwood
- Shaker Heights
- Cleveland Heights
- Warrensville Heights
- Euclid
- Bratenahl
- Cuyahoga Heights
- Newburgh Heights
Lake County
Nursery blocks and field edges, lakefront bluffs, Grand River corridor, ravine lots and private drives.
- Mentor
- Mentor-on-the-Lake
- Willoughby
- Willoughby Hills
- Willowick
- Eastlake
- Wickliffe
- Timberlake
- Lakeline
- Waite Hill
- Kirtland
- Kirtland Hills
- Concord
- Painesville
- Grand River
- Fairport Harbor
- Perry
- North Perry
- Madison
- Leroy
Working a parcel just outside these lines? Call it in anyway — if the mobilization makes sense we will price it, and if it does not we will tell you rather than quietly padding the number.
What contractors ask before they list us in a bid
Straight answers to the questions that decide whether a clearing sub is usable on a commercial job.
Can you give me a clearing number before I win the job?
Yes. We price clearing off the parcel, not off a signed contract. Send the address and the limits you need cleared and you get a fixed per-acre figure you can drop into your bid line. If you don't win the work, you owe us nothing and the number simply expires.
Are you insured, and can I get a COI naming my company as additional insured?
Yes. BrushBoss is insured, and a certificate of insurance naming your company as additional insured is available on request, along with a completed W-9 for your accounts payable file. Ask for both when you accept the quote so your paperwork clears before we mobilize.
Who owns the customer relationship when I bring you onto my job?
You do. We invoice you, not your client. We do not price the work that follows ours, we do not solicit your customer during or after the clearing, and we are off the site once the cleared area is signed off. The relationship stays exactly where it started.
How much lead time do you need to hold a date?
Call and we'll tell you the current window before you commit to a schedule. Spring and fall book heaviest in Cuyahoga and Lake County, and frozen or saturated ground moves dates, so the honest answer is that the board changes week to week. We confirm your window in writing with the quote rather than guessing at it.
What access does a tight Cuyahoga infill lot need for you to work?
We need a trailer drop within reasonable reach of the work and an opening the tracked carrier can pass through — a construction gate, a curb cut, a side yard, or a rear easement all work. We walk access before quoting so the access problem is priced in, not discovered on mobilization day. If the only way in is across finished pavement or turf, tell us and we'll plan matting into the scope.
Is there a minimum acreage or a minimum dollar amount?
No. There is no minimum acreage and no minimum dollar amount. Fence lines, buffer strips, basin banks and easement runs are all normal work for us, and small areas are priced individually rather than turned away. Send the area and we'll price it.
What does the per-acre price include, and is hauling billed separately?
The per-acre price includes the clearing and the disposal, because there is no disposal. Standing growth is mulched in place and the material stays on the ground as a surface layer. There is no haul-off, no roll-off, no tipping fee and no burn pile, so there is no second invoice after the work is done. Flat-ground mulching runs $2,300 – $2,990 per acre by brush density; steep banks, ravine walls and heavily restricted access are quoted on their own.
Can you clear to our stakes and our plan sheet?
Yes. We work to your stakes, your flagging, your limits of disturbance or a marked-up plan sheet, and we clear that area and nothing else. Trees you want left standing get left standing. If your survey moves, send the revision and we re-mark before the machine starts.
Get the acreage priced before the bid goes in
Tell us the parcel and what has to come out. You'll get a fixed per-acre clearing figure you can carry into your own proposal — with no obligation, no site-visit fee, and no contact with your customer.
Cuyahoga County and Lake County, Ohio · forestry mulching and brush clearing, subcontracted.