Create more jobs

JULY 22, 2009

THE BUFFALO NEWS EDITORIAL

County Legislature should help workers, not impose self-defeating conditions

With friends like these, construction workers in Erie County don’t need any enemies.

Under the guise of protecting local workers, leaders of the Erie County Legislature are foolishly sabotaging tax-exempt financing for some long-planned and much-needed construction projects now on the drawing boards of various non-profit and educational institutions.

In an era when very little is being built, a demand that civic projects be held hostage to high and, for non-profits, unaffordable wage scales is hardly a favor to unemployed and under-employed workers. It simply serves to torpedo some of the few projects that would get them skilled jobs.

The plan, promoted by County Executive Chris Collins, would use an existing arm of the Erie County Industrial Development Agency as the vehicle for the kind of tax-exempt financing that has been unreachable as the state authorization for similar mechanisms has been mired in Albany.

But, just as the solution was about to be rolled out, it ran into a union-built roadblock in the County Legislature. At the insistence of Economic Development Committee Chairman Timothy M. Kennedy, and with the support of Legislature Chairwoman Lynn M. Marinelli, the necessary enabling legislation was weighed down with requirements that, among other things, add apprenticeship training programs and make projects funded by the process offer the area’s prevailing wage to construction workers.

Such a provision would boost the cost of construction projects by an estimated 28 percent to 30 percent. That would more than offset the estimated 10 percent to 15 percent the projects would save by having their efforts blessed by the IDA.

And that would mean that the projects, already stalled by poor economic times, are likely to remain on the drawing board for the foreseeable future. Those projects include improvements planned by Women and Children’s Hospital, D’Youville College, Tapestry Charter School and the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

This is the same issue that has blocked the issue on the state level. It makes no more sense here than it does there.

Democrats should get over their dislike for Republican Collins, whose sometimes-overbearing style rubs a lot of people the wrong way. They, and their union supporters, should also get past their memory of days when union activists actually were the only thing between respectable wages and grinding poverty.

For very many years, in very many places, the owners of all kinds of businesses were heard to argue that the simplest consideration for labor—minimum wages, child labor bans, worker safety requirements—would boost labor costs so much as to put their employers out of business.

But the alternative to high prevailing wages in the current debate is not slave labor. It is gainful employment, usually at a union scale, creating not only valuable economic activity but also new schools, hospitals and other projects that the entire community can be proud of. While union wages may not be as high as the “prevailing wages” going to workers tapping federal dollars on such projects as the courthouse, it’s still good money for jobs that won’t be there at all if nothing gets built.

Collins doesn’t really help matters by getting down into the partisan dirt with his rivals, quickly reaching for the cudgel of how lawmakers who oppose him on this, or any, issue only embolden potential challengers in the next election.

But, in this case, Collins is the one with the practical solution. His idea should be approved. For the good of the whole community.