Bids for the $100 million Lake Champlain Bridge project, spanning the state line between Crown Point NY and Chimney Point, VT, were received on April 15 without the requirement of a project labor agreement (PLA). The bridge project is being overseen by a joint authority of the NY State Department of Transportation and the Vermont Agency of Transportation. The NYSDOT is taking the lead role in administering the project and they proposed that all contractors who want to work on the new Lake Champlain Bridge project would have to sign a wasteful and discriminatory project labor agreement, requiring all contractors to execute a union agreement, hire only union workers, pay into union pension and benefit funds and operate under inefficient union work rules.

The Douglas Administration, The Vermont Agency of Transportation and the Vermont House and Senate Transportation Committees stood up for Vermont workers by calling on the NYSDOT to not use a PLA.

Big Labor established PLAs in the early twentieth-century, when a significant percentage of the private construction workforce was unionized, to help trade unions that couldn’t get along with each other to work together. ABC stressed the fact that today PLAs are nothing more than a wasteful, politically-motivated market recovery programs for unions that need to rebuild their membership after seeing their numbers decline precipitously for the last 50 years. 4.5 percent of Vermont’s private construction workforce is unionized. Putting a PLA on the Champlain Bridge project would have resulted in 9 out of every 10 local construction workers being strongly discouraged, if not essentially barred, from competing for these jobs. The PLA was also bad news for Vermont taxpayers. With Vermont’s taxpayers fronting over $10 million for this project, they could have expected millions in wasted tax dollars thanks to the New York Department of Transportation’s proposed PLA. The bottom line is PLAs are special interest handouts that deny taxpayers the accountability they deserve on public construction projects. ABC is optimistic now that the prime contractor bids have been received a PLA will not be included on the project.