Union Rule Faces a Rare Fight; Dear to Labor, Wicks Contracting Law Is Debated in Albany
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As long as there has been a Wicks Law, which is 72 years now, there have been people trying to repeal it. “It’s a horror,” said Henry Stern, president of Citizens Union, a nonprofit government monitoring group. He and other opponents of Wicks, which requires local governments to hire at least four separate contractors rather than one general contractor for most projects, say that it inflates construction costs on public projects across the state by $400 million a year. Despite perennial efforts to rescind the Wicks Law, it has stayed off the legislative agenda for decades, mostly because of the sophisticated lobbying and generous political contributions of its prime beneficiaries — the state’s plumbing, electrical and heating trades. But this year opponents are organizing a new campaign. For the first time in memory, legislators in both houses have introduced a bill to give local governments the option of following the law or not. Most say they would not, given the choice. Construction trade unions, which have long supported the Wicks Law, are mobilizing for a fight to defend it. The law allows them to negotiate contracts directly with public agencies, instead of having to go through a single general contractor. Although critics charge that the system results in higher public contracts, the unions argue that the problems in public construction have nothing to do with Wicks and everything to do with inefficient government. The solution, they say, is for public agencies to send in good contract managers to oversee the agencies’ projects and resolve construction disputes. The opponents of the law are trying to bolster their case by citing a new report from one of the most active public building agencies in the state, the New York City School Construction Authority. The authority was exempted from the Wicks Law four years ago by the Legislature as a kind of experiment to test whether the law creates as much inefficiency as opponents claim. That experiment has a year more to run. But in the meantime, the authority has just completed a study of the impact of the Wicks Law on other agencies in New York City and concluded that projects exempted from Wicks cost 13 percent less and were completed an average of 15.6 months more quickly than Wicks projects. Opponents Are Encouraged The report, prepared by a team of outside economists hired by the construction authority, based its findings on an analysis of 163 public projects built in New York City during the 1980’s, like housing, schools and firehouses. Eighty-six of the projects were subject to Wicks; 77 were not, because some agencies are exempt from the law or are only required to follow it for some of their projects. Though the consultants said they would not be able to complete their analysis of the authority’s own experience until next year, when the five-year experiment is up, their study, which the authority describes as the most comprehensive study of the law ever conducted, has greatly encouraged Wicks’s opponents. “This report strongly supports our contention that state and local agencies should be given the choice to build with or without the Wicks Law provision,” said State Senator Roy M. Goodman, a Manhattan Republican, who is sponsoring the bill with Assemblyman Steven Sanders, a Manhattan Democrat. Multiple Contracts Required More : query.nytimes.com |