Santa Barbara contractors are digging in for a pitched battle with City Hall over a newly proposed policy to prioritize the hiring of local unionized workers for major capital construction projects. The proposal came during the council’s September 25 hearing from Councilmember Gregg Hart, who argued a Community Workforce Agreement would ensure high-caliber craftsmanship from trained journeymen. Councilmember Eric Friedman said it would also give a leg up to the Santa Barbara tradespeople who are sometimes squeezed out of jobs by out of town crews.
“We have an obligation to prioritize our local workforce,” Friedman said. “We should put our families in our county and in our city first.”
In a later interview, Hart explained that the city’s current method of selecting the lowest bidder for public-works projects limits its control over quality. He pointed to the desalination plant, originally constructed in the early '90s and found during its recent renovation to be full of poor planning and shoddy documentation, which required millions in cost overruns to correct. It’s not uncommon, Hart went on, for problems to arise when nonunion contractors use general-skilled workers on speciality projects. “You don’t have a general practitioner do surgery,” he said.