Linn County’s PLA experiment

Linn County is embarking on what the board of supervisors says is an experiment. It's potentially precedent-setting. So when completed, it should be thoroughly evaluated to determine whether more regular use is warranted.

Supervisors last month approved a project labor agreement (PLA) to construct a new community services building. It's a first for the county. Public PLAs are rare in Iowa; they're more common in the private sector in this state and generally across the nation. Public entities have generally avoided them because of the political crossfire they tend to generate.

A PLA requires contractors to pay the prevailing wage and benefits that are established through existing union contract negotiations. It's more involved than that, however. A PLA is supposed to facilitate on-time and on-budget completion of a project by getting all the participants to agree to several ground rules in advance. Labor leaders and contractors agree to avoid walkouts and lockouts.

The county's version is modeled after a Polk County PLA that built the Wells Fargo Arena.

While that project was controversial and there were some delays and cost overruns, Linn supervisors chose a similar route because the Polk PLA withstood a legal test at the Iowa Supreme Court and they were concerned that a previous option explored would not.

Their first effort was to craft an ordinance of bidding qualifications that would favor local contractors who paid and trained their workers to certain standards. Counsel advised that it was vulnerable to a lawsuit.

But will the county's PLA meet the original objective of most or all work being done by local contractors and workers? Supervisor chair Linda Langston told us she expects many local bidders to compete. Still, there's no guarantee that “buy local” will predominate.

Langston said she would have been “happy” to forego a PLA and forge a construction contract under the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires only that prevailing wage and benefits be paid for projects involving federal dollars other than from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett recently advocated prevailing wage for several large city projects.

However, Langston said that FEMA, which will pay nearly two-thirds of the county's

$13.8 million project because it's tied to the 2008 flood, doesn't allow that option for the Linn project because the county's ordinances don't provide for Davis-Bacon but do allow a PLA.

Got all that? It's an example of how complicated this stuff can be.

Meanwhile, many construction workers are out of work these days. Most of the construction projects available are publicly financed. Paying prevailing wage, if it goes mostly to local workers and firms, can keep more money back in our county and region's economy and also generate taxes to support public services. And as the mayor noted, good wages and more employment can build morale as the community recovers from the 2008 flood as well as effects from the national recession.

Still, we wonder whether the PLA will use taxpayer money efficiently and also provide fair opportunity for responsible companies who employ non-union labor. Under Iowa law, public-sector PLAs cannot discriminate between union and non-union entities. Yet Linn County's PLA requires that up to 50 percent of each crew's members be union, even though more than 80 percent of Iowa's construction work force is non-union.

Those issues and overall performance expectations demand that Linn County's first public PLA outcomes be objectively measured.