Charter Frustration in Elk Grove Shows Who Really Runs This State

In the aftermath of the Elk Grove City Council's decision not to act on the proposed charter, Elk Grove News invited two organizations to offer their opinion on the charter's most controversial topic, prevailing wages.

Last week Nicole Goehring, Government Affairs Director with the Associated Builders and Contractors Golden Gate Chapter and Matt Kelly with the Sacramento-Sierra’s Building and Construction Trades Council were invited to submit their respective opinions.

Below is Nicole Goering’s response on behalf of the Associated Builders and Contractors Golden Gate Chapter. Kelly did not respond to the invitation.

By Nicole Goehring

Government Affairs Director

Associated Builders and Contractors Golden Gate Chapter

At a time of budget constraints, the City of Elk Grove had an opportunity this year to free itself from some of the expensive mandates coming from the state legislature. Why should Elk Grove subject so much of its own municipal business to state laws derived from the crusades and whims of state legislators from Los Angeles and San Francisco ?

Every election, voters in a few cities decide that it’s time to get the fiscally irresponsible state behemoth off their backs. As of today, 116 cities of the 478 cities in California have given themselves a significant degree of independence for many aspects of municipal affairs by adopting a “charter.”

In November 2009, voters in the cities of Palmdale and El Centro approved charters. In November 2008, voters in the cities of Buena Park and Santee approved charters. Several cities are considering putting charters before their voters in the November 2010 elections.

In May 2008, the Elk Grove City Council passed a resolution to appoint a seven-member “charter commission” to draft a charter for consideration by Elk Grove voters in the November 2010 election. The city council also directed the commission to create and participate in community outreach.

As the commission deliberated about the direction of the charter, a special interest group with a tight grip on the business of the state legislature decided that Elk Grove wasn’t going to slip out of its grasp with a charter. Construction union lobbyists out of Sacramento did not like language in the first draft of the charter that suggested that the city had power over public works construction policies, including powers not specifically enumerated in the charter. They demanded that the city council include language in the charter that would anchor the city to all state prevailing wage mandates.

This union-backed language meant that Elk Grove could not determine its own city prevailing wage rates by surveying its own local contractors and workers. Instead, it would permanently depend on the Department of Industrial Relations headquarters in San Francisco to set its prevailing wages. Indeed, there were numerous possible prevailing wage policies that Elk Grove would be prohibited from enacting if the union language was inserted in the charter:

· Exempting volunteers from the requirement to be paid prevailing wage, if the state legislature listens to the demands of certain unions and chooses not to renew the current volunteer exemption in state law when it expires on January 1, 2012.

· Giving contractors the reasonable option not to pay the so-called “other” component of state prevailing wage under the premise that employer payments for trust funds identified in collective bargaining agreements with unspecified and unaccountable purposes are not legitimate or proven direct employee benefits, and therefore those payments should not be part of prevailing wage determinations. Although prevailing wage has been state law since 1931, this absurd expansion of prevailing wage was only approved by the legislature six years ago in a political maneuver as Governor Davis was about to be recalled.

· Giving contractors the option not to recognize artificial and arbitrary project cost thresholds that jack up state-mandated wage rates, such as the prevailing wage determination for carpenters in Northern California in the early 2000s that increased wage rates for projects worth $25 million or more – a state policy established without statutory authority when the Department of Industrial Relations dutifully included the threshold contained in a collective bargaining agreement into a prevailing wage determination.

· Allowing contractors building metal roofs to pay the prevailing wage rates for sheet metal workers or for roofers, depending on who is employed to do the work.

· Allowing contractors to request and employ apprentices from a program that is not approved by the state to provide on-the-job training to apprentices in Sacramento County but is approved by the state to provide on-the-job training to apprentices in adjacent San Joaquin County.

· Allowing exemptions for non-profit or commercial recipients of local government assistance from prevailing wage requirements

The creative possibilities for a charter city to encourage local economic growth and job creation and encourage training opportunities in the construction trades by establishing its own prevailing wage policies are extensive, as state prevailing wage law is so extensive and complicated.

But when the union special interests showed up in Elk Grove with their mission to derail the charter commission’s consideration of city policies regarding bidding on public works (as directed under Section 1(d) of the resolution establishing the commission), the city council undermined the charter commission. At the September 9 city council meeting, to the delight of union officials at the meeting, a majority of the city council members directed the charter commission to add to its charter recommendation the exact language from a letter submitted to the city council by the Sacramento-Sierra Building and Construction Trades Council.

At that point the well was poisoned. On January 13, the commission presented its proposed final charter – defiantly without the union-backed prevailing wage mandate – to the city council. It then disbanded. On January 13, to the drumbeats of union lobbyists, the city council voted not to put the charter on a future ballot for the voters to decide.

What’s the point of a city charter that lists the kinds of municipal business that it wants the California State Legislature to control? You might as well reserve a spot on the city council for a state legislator from Los Angeles – or more appropriately, a union lobbyist from Sacramento .