Officials on the Park Ridge-Niles District 64 Board of Education flirted during the June 26 meeting with voting against adoption of the Cook County prevailing wage — a move that would have resulted in a lawsuit and a stop to ongoing construction work in the district, officials and administrators said.
After taking the item off their consent agenda, the board voted 5-2 in favor of adopting the Cook County prevailing wage. The state’s prevailing wage law requires contractors and subcontractors to pay laborers working on public works construction projects no less than the prevailing wage rate, which is determined by the state’s Department of Labor on a county-by-county basis, according to that agency.
Board Vice President Rick Biagi kicked off the board’s conversation with a strong indictment of the law. He called it the “single most destructive thing on the book,” and added that it creates “a false floor for labor costs, which then takes competition out of the mix.”
Board members appeared to be in agreement on the prevailing wage; nearly every member expressed distaste for the law, and a majority also expressed a strong desire to vote against it.
Chief School Business Official Luann Kolstad said if the board chose to vote against adopting the county’s prevailing wage “obviously we’re going to be sued, and the second thing is I assume our contractors will walk off the job.” District 64 Superintendent Laurie Heinz said the board had to approve the prevailing wage by June 30.
Board President Tony Borrelli described the law as “an egregious thing forced upon the district, but it is being forced upon the district, and I don’t see a way out of it.”
“I’ve been against this whole prevailing wage thing for a long time,” board member Tom Sotos said. “Having said that, what can we do? Obviously, if we all vote no, and I tend to want to because I agree with you, but if we all do, we’d be putting ourselves in a position where it would cost us more than we’d potentially save.”
To not approve the prevailing wage would be “so injurious to us, and in the end we’re going to be sued and spend money at the very minimal to defend that and then get the same wage scale anyway,” Borrelli said.
Borrelli, Sotos and Biagi all suggested that the district consider tasking administrators with surveying local contractors in an effort to establish their own prevailing wage on the assumption that it may be cheaper than the wage set by the Department of Labor for Cook County.
Mark Eggemann, who voted against adopting the prevailing wage, said the reason the district pays as much as it does for construction projects is due to the prevailing wage law. But, he said, tasking administrators with putting together a prevailing wage for the district “is not a good use of their time.”
To assuage the board’s dissatisfaction with regard to the wage law, Heinz suggested officials pull the item off their consent agenda in the future and seek counsel “from I’m not really sure whom” in an effort to fight back against the law.
Biagi said the only way the law could be overturned is if the public demanded change in Springfield, or if a large number of local units of government banded together in opposition to the law and pooled their resources to fund a legal defense against inevitable lawsuits.
Borrelli said he would be happy to sign onto a campaign against the prevailing wage.
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“I’d like to be party to someone else’s cause,” he said.
Opposing the wage law would “put a big wedge” between the board and the district’s collective bargaining units,” board member Eastman Tiu said.
In response, Biagi said, “bring it on.”
Biagi ultimately voted in favor of adopting the county’s prevailing wage on the condition that the board continue to publicly address the issue.
“On every single capital project this board discusses, I want numbers in front of the public put out in advance about what the prevailing wage is increasing the cost (of the project) by,” he said.
Sotos also voted yes, but he similarly demanded a commitment from the board to “slowly have this fight and do what we need to do to research, educate ourselves and the public at every possible turn.”
In addition to Eggemann, board member Larry Ryles also voted against the measure.
Lee V. Gaines is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.