State should back off of wage push

It’s not hard to understand the philosophical justification for requiring public bodies to pay a “prevailing wage” for the contracted public works jobs they undertake. Towns ought not be in the habit of exploiting independent contractors nor of skirting wage requirements by hiring independent contractors at lower rates than they pay their full-time staffs.

But given the realities of the current economic environment — both for municipalities and for the businesses with which they might be inclined to contract — it’s just as easy to see why towns like Mount Prospect are bristling at the state’s apparently recent push to increase and expand enforcement of a 1940s-era regulation that stands to cost them tens of thousands of dollars with little to show for it beyond a reduction in the number of local jobs.

At a recent village board meeting Mount Prospect Village Manager Michael Janonis called the state’s application of the prevailing wage requirement to landscaping work the equivalent of an “unfunded mandate.” He and other village officials said that if Mount Prospect, currently fighting an emerald ash borer infestation, were required to pay the state-imposed prevailing wage for all landscape and maintenance work, it could cost 65 percent to 100 percent more to provide residents the same level of service they get today.

Part of the problem here appears to be in what specific jobs have historically been considered to be affected by the state’s prevailing wage law and what jobs state officials could interpret on their own to be affected. A state Department of Labor spokesman told Daily Herald staff writer Madhu Krishnamurthy for a story this week that the law has always applied to maintenance and landscape work, though village officials in Mount Prospect indicated that only construction projects have traditionally been affected.

Now, it goes without saying that maintenance and landscape workers have as much right to equitable pay as construction workers, but the larger question is whether the state can accurately determine what the prevailing wage is for a landscape worker or a maintenance worker in Mount Prospect or any other Illinois town.

With that thinking in mind, Mount Prospect is considering conducting its own wage survey, as Naperville already has done, to determine the “prevailing wage” for public works jobs it is undertaking. But such surveys are expensive, and extrapolated for hundreds of Illinois towns, they amount to an unfair and excessive alternative for counteracting a capricious and unclear bureaucratic regulation.

A better alternative is for the state to stand down on efforts to impose new demands on financially strapped local governments, at least until the merits of the six-decades-old legislation they are invoking can be more satisfactorily debated and more clearly interpreted.