We've seen the commercials: the "new New York" is open for business, serious about private-sector job creation. We've also heard the rhetoric about Albany's desire for reform and transparency in the way in which government conducts the people's business.
Yet recent actions by the state Department of Transportation indicate that some things haven't really changed.
In 2011, DOT awarded a $70 million, heavy highway construction project in Orange County to the second-lowest bidder. The low bidder, by $4.5 million, was Lancaster Development of Schoharie County. DOT denied Lancaster the work because it refused to participate in a mandatory Project Labor Agreement that was imposed on the contract.
Lancaster challenged the bid award in state Supreme Court and won. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Teresi in a stinging rebuke to the DOT declared the contract void and found the bid process to have been hopelessly compromised by actions of the state.
Astonishingly, the DOT is again insisting that it will rebid the project with a PLA. This is bad news for taxpayers and the concept of competitive bidding.
In making this decision, the DOT is not being honest with taxpayers and is instead attempting to legally rig this highway contract so that only union workers are employed on the project. DOT Commissioner Joan McDonald has even gone so far as to issue a finding justifying the PLA, which relies upon inaccurate, incomplete and misleading information obtained from a consultant study.
The study — which was released by DOT only after legal proceedings were commenced by Lancaster to obtain it — contends that a PLA using union labor would complete the project for approximately $70.6 million. Yet, the study ignores the fact that Lancaster's 2011 bid for this identical project was $67.8 million.
The DOT also accepted the study's assertion that 85 percent of the highway construction workforce in Orange County belong to unions. This estimate is wildly inflated and relies on unsupported assertions by the Laborers Union, hardly an unbiased source for this information.
The DOT contends that similar projects in the region have mostly been performed by union firms. This, too, is factually wrong. Since 2005, more than 70 percent of winning bids on major DOT projects in Orange County were submitted by open-shop firms like Lancaster.
Lancaster is one of the best heavy highway firms in the state, employing hundreds of local workers and doing multiple projects in our region, including the large Exit 6 Northway project in 2011. It has completed projects on-time and on-budget.
Trade unions are pushing for a PLA for the sole reason that it keeps firms like Lancaster from bidding. Prevailing wages are always paid on public work, but union work rules often make union firms more costly than nonunion competitors. If an open-shop firm like Lancaster were to agree to a PLA, it would mean it could not use most of its own workers and must instead only hire from the union hall. To say, as some PLA supporters do, that open shop firms can bid on such projects is only true in a technical sense. By what logic would a firm bid on a contract and then be precluded from using its own workers?
Taxpayers are best served when firms compete on a level playing field. May the best, responsible bidder with the lowest price, whether union or nonunion, get the work. The public is ill-served when state officials subvert the process by imposing unnecessary rules that raise costs. Glitzy commercials are no subsitute for honest government.
Stephen Lefebvre is president of the Empire State chapter of Associated Builders & Contractors.