Committee members, city staff and regional union reps dug deep into the potential effects of a proposed Responsible Bidder Ordinance (RBO), with a particular focus on a mandate that requires contractors engage in union apprenticeship training, during a Wednesday meeting of the city’s Minority, Women, Disadvantaged & Evanston Business Enterprise (M/W/D/EBE) Development Committee.
An RBO would create requirements for companies bidding on public works construction projects worth at least $25,000, as well as any subcontractors hired onto the job by the primary contract winner.
The proposal was referred in March by Council Member Clare Kelly (1st Ward), with co-sponsorships from Tom Suffredin (6th Ward) and Mayor Daniel Biss. It is backed by several regional construction trade unions, members of which held a downtown rally in October 2023 to demonstrate their support.
A full RBO draft went before the committee, along with a “Responsible Bidder Toolkit” from the “Illinois Indiana Iowa Foundation for Fair Contracting.”
Chair and Council Member Bobby Burns (5th Ward) led the group through reviewing each provision of the draft to determine how much (if any) they differ from existing city policy and whether they’d have any “unintended consequences.”
This review touched on everything from safety training minimums to compliance with prevailing wages, but the greatest attention was given to a new requirement that bidders and their subcontractors provide “evidence of participation in apprenticeship training programs” specific to the trade(s) being performed in a given contract at the time of the bid submission. These programs would have to be registered with the U.S. Department of Labor and have graduated at least five apprentices in each of the previous five years to be valid.
As written, this provision wouldn’t strictly require the apprenticeship programs be run by trade unions.
But City Engineer Lara Biggs said that since there are no independent apprenticeship programs in Evanston, “practically speaking, only a union contractor can comply” with the requirement.
Biggs said that “all of [the city’s] contractors are union contractors” in common contracts for things like street resurfacing and alley paving, essentially leaving those unchanged.
She also pointed out although Copenhaver Construction “did a very poor job” in their work on the botched Fountain Square project, they “would have passed this test with flying colors” as a union contractor. She said there’s a greater issue in facilities and parks projects, as fewer local contractors the city frequently works with are union signatories, and adding the apprenticeship requirement could “really limit the number of bidders that we get.”
“Many of our smaller Evanston businesses don’t want, or are not able, to be union contractors,” Biggs said. “I think that having this kind of apprenticeship requirement has the potential to really impact our ability just to get bids in, regardless of if they’re qualified or not. We only get one to three bids on most of our contracts.”
A variety of ideas were discussed to alleviate this potential burden, from raising the dollar threshold where the RBO applies to simply waiving the requirement for longtime recurring contractors, which Burns said is what he believes other cities with RBOs tend to do.
Organizer John Gallagher from Ironworkers Local 1 said “nothing would excite [him] more” than an Evanston member starting their own union-affiliated shop that could meet the requirement, both filling any gap of a local shop that could bid under the RBO and helping maintain the union’s market share (and thus apprenticeship recruitment) in Chicagoland.
“We need contractors,” Gallagher said. “It’s just that we have to have the market share for them to survive.”
Labor attorney Jeremy Esparza from Laborers Local One added that he’s reached out to non-profits Rebuilding Exchange and Revolution Workshop about collaborating with them on the RBO legislation, given both have existing pre-apprenticeship training programs. Robert Piane of Carpenters Local 58 said the union already works with Rebuilding Exchange’s program and places graduates as apprentices on local projects, such as the recently-completed Evanston Labs tower.
Burns said he’s “interested in what the nonprofit path looks like,” and also asked the union reps present to come to the next meeting with their unions’ signatory requirements so they can understand the potential costs for contractors to become union shops.
The conversation at Wednesday’s meeting will feed into a revised draft returning to the committee for a final review and recommendation vote at their next meeting, scheduled for Oct. 16.
Burns said that although it “may seem like this is a slow process” to discuss each provision in such detail, he thinks it is the best approach since any ordinance the committee votes on will go straight to City Council for consideration, rather than going to a higher committee for further review.
“I think we’ve done probably 80 to 90% of the work today, that’s why I wanted to go through this,” Burns said. “Next meeting, we probably won’t spend a ton of time on it, it’ll just be us saying, ‘Yep, this accurately captures our concerns. our thoughts, our comments, our recommendations,’ and then that’ll be forwarded to [City] Council.”
Apprenticeship requirements lead committee’s deep dive on ‘responsible bidder’ proposal is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston’s most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.
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September 22, 2024 at 10:07PM
