Low Voltage Contractor Serving Sacramento and the Central Valley

Home base since 1983#

Telelink Business Services has worked out of Sacramento since 1983. Estimating, project management and the crews that pull the cable are here, which changes how a project in this region runs compared with the other regions we serve. A site walk in Rancho Cordova or Roseville is handled by the estimator who will price the job. Punch list items downtown are handled by our own technicians, usually the crew that did the work. Our project managers already know the loading dock hours and garage clearances downtown.

Area	How work is dispatched
Sacramento core and downtown	Crews out of the Sacramento shop; punch and service handled by our own technicians
Roseville, Rocklin, Folsom, Elk Grove, Davis	Day trips with no mobilization premium
Vacaville, Fairfield, Dixon	Day trips from Sacramento, bid as part of this region
Stockton, Lodi, Tracy, Manteca, Modesto, Turlock	Day trips on Interstate 5 or Highway 99, priced as day trips
Vallejo and Benicia	Covered on the Bay Area page, not this one

The region as we define it runs from the Sacramento core out to Placer and El Dorado counties on the east, Yolo on the west, the Vacaville and Fairfield side of Solano County, and south through San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties. Western Solano behaves like the Bay Area in traffic, labor market and building departments, so it is bid there.

Most of the work is commercial and institutional: state agency tenant improvements, office TI for private landlords, K-12 and community college campuses, clinics, multifamily rehabs and distribution buildings along the I-5 and Highway 99 corridors. We do not do residential work in any region, including this one.

Permitting paths: city, county and state-owned buildings#

Low voltage permitting in this region depends entirely on the address. Two projects ten minutes apart can sit with two different jurisdictions.

Jurisdiction	Permitting authority	Path for the low voltage scope
City of Sacramento	Community Development Department	Online submittal and permit tracking through an Accela-based citizen portal
Unincorporated Sacramento County	County Building Permits and Inspection Division	A separate office with its own plan checkers, inspectors and scheduling
Elk Grove, Folsom, Rancho Cordova, Citrus Heights, Roseville, Rocklin	Each city’s own building division	Own counters, portals and inspection scheduling
Davis, Woodland, West Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto	Each city’s own building division	Own counters, portals and inspection scheduling
State-owned buildings	Not permitted at the city counter	State Fire Marshal and DSA review, with DGS controlling the floor
Community college and K-12	Division of the State Architect	DSA plan review with a DSA inspector of record
Sacramento State and UC Davis	The campus is its own building official	State Fire Marshal review, campus inspection

For most commercial low voltage scopes, the cabling, camera and access control work is permitted as part of the project’s building permit or under an electrical permit that the GC or the electrical contractor pulls, with our work inspected alongside the rest of the electrical rough-in and finish. Where a jurisdiction wants a separate low voltage or electrical permit for our scope, we pull it under CSLB #472017. We confirm which path applies during bid review and state it in the scope letter, because an unpulled permit stalls the final inspection.

Inspectors in this region look at the same things everywhere: firestopping at rated penetrations, plenum-rated cable where the ceiling is a return air plenum, support and pathway fill, and separation from line voltage. We build to those expectations from the first pull.

Working in state office buildings#

Sacramento is the state capital, and a large part of the tenant improvement work here is inside state-owned or state-leased office buildings. These projects do not run like a private office TI, and four separate authorities touch the low voltage scope.

Review or control	Who holds it	What it governs
Fire and life safety plan review	Office of the State Fire Marshal	Penetrations, rated assemblies, plan approval
Accessibility review	Division of the State Architect	Device heights, path of travel, mounting locations
Floor access and building operations	Department of General Services, which manages the buildings	Badging for every worker, loading dock reservations, freight elevator windows, after-hours HVAC, and when noise-producing work is allowed near occupied cubicles
Cable color, labeling, rack elevations, network room access	The tenant agency’s IT group	The agency standard, which overrides the generic spec

We ask for the agency IT standard before submittals go out, not after. The State Controller’s Office project was exactly this kind of job: a working agency floor, staff at their desks, network cabling and an IT network room buildout delivered in sequence with the rest of the TI, plus surveillance.

Background checks and badging for agency work take time to process. We put that on the schedule at kickoff rather than discovering it the week before mobilization.

Prevailing wage and labor requirements in the Sacramento region#

Public work in the region, whether a state building, a county facility, a school district or a city project, is prevailing wage work under Labor Code 1720 and following. The Department of Industrial Relations publishes general prevailing wage determinations by county and classification twice a year.

Where the work is	Wage determination priced	IBEW jurisdiction
Sacramento, Placer, El Dorado and Yolo counties	Communications and Systems Installer and Technician for low voltage scope	Local 340
Eastern Solano, including Vacaville, Fairfield and Dixon	Communications and Systems Installer and Technician	Local 180, the Vallejo local, which covers Solano County
San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties	Each county’s own determination, read on the bid date	Other locals, confirmed at bid
Any county, scope crossing into electrical	Inside Wireman	Same as the county

Rates, fringe amounts and predetermined increases differ by county, and each bid is priced against the determination in force for the project location and bid date. Public projects also require DIR contractor registration under Labor Code 1725.5, certified payroll submitted through DIR’s electronic system, and apprenticeship compliance under Labor Code 1777.5. Registration and current certificates are in the prequalification packet.

Some public projects and a few private ones in the region carry project labor agreements or other labor requirements. Those are addressed at bid time, in writing, in the scope letter, so there is no surprise after award.

Access, parking and staging around the Capitol and on campuses#

Downtown Sacramento has a small footprint and a lot of state employees. Contractor parking near Capitol Mall, the R Street corridor and the state office buildings east of the Capitol is garage or metered street parking, and the building manager will tell you which lot, if any, the project may use. Loading docks are shared with the building’s daily deliveries. Freight elevators get reserved in advance. On a state floor, materials come up in the window the building manager gives you, and material is not staged in corridors.

Campus work has its own access rules. Sacramento State, UC Davis, the Los Rios community colleges and the K-12 districts all issue contractor parking permits, restrict truck routes during class changes and prefer heavy work during academic breaks. We schedule around those calendars and put the constraints in the bid so the GC’s schedule reflects the campus calendar.

Outside the core, the region is drivable. Roseville, Folsom, Elk Grove and Davis are day trips with no mobilization premium. Stockton and Modesto are also day trips, priced as such, with the I-5 and Highway 99 traffic patterns built into the work day rather than ignored.

What we delivered at the State Controller’s Office#

The State Controller’s Office project in Sacramento was a tenant improvement on a working state agency floor. Scope was network cabling to the new workstation layout, buildout of the IT network room, and surveillance. Staff kept working on the floor throughout, so the work was phased by area, coordinated with the GC’s ceiling and finish schedule, and kept clear of the agency’s live network until cutover.

That project shows the deliverables a state TI produces:

• Submittals that show the electrical handoff for rack power and room bonding
• Labeling that matches the agency’s scheme
• Permanent link test results delivered at closeout
• A network room the agency’s IT group could walk into and operate

The government and public works market page describes the broader approach to agency work, including DIR registration and NDAA equipment documentation.

Counties and cities we cover from Sacramento#

County	Cities we cover
Sacramento	Sacramento, Elk Grove, Folsom, Rancho Cordova, Citrus Heights, Galt
Placer	Roseville, Rocklin, Lincoln, Auburn
El Dorado	El Dorado Hills, Placerville, Cameron Park
Yolo	Davis, Woodland, West Sacramento
Solano, eastern side	Vacaville, Fairfield, Dixon
San Joaquin	Stockton, Lodi, Tracy, Manteca
Stanislaus	Modesto, Turlock

Solano County appears in the county list on this page and on the Bay Area page, because the county is split between the two. Vacaville, Fairfield and Dixon are bid from Sacramento. Vallejo and Benicia are bid as Bay Area work.

Services most often requested in this region are structured cabling, network room buildout, security camera systems and access control, usually bundled into a single Division 27 and 28 scope.

Next step#

Send the drawings, the Division 27 and 28 spec sections, the bid date, and the tenant agency’s IT standard if the project is in a state-owned or state-leased building, through the request a bid page or by email to carson@telelinkca.com. Because estimating and the crews are in Sacramento, a site walk here is arranged from our own shop rather than priced as a trip. What comes back names the jurisdiction and permit path for that address, the DIR determination for that county the labor is priced against, the DGS badging and freight elevator lead time carried on the schedule, and the closeout deliverables the agency IT group will receive. If you are a general contractor building a bid list, the for general contractors page explains what our prequalification packet contains and how we hand off scope to the electrician and the door hardware supplier.