The Arlington School Board has approved construction of a new Arlington Career Center building without a guarantee of paying workers a prevailing wage.
Seeking to avoid rebidding the project and causing at least a year of delays, Board members voted 4-0 last night (Thursday) to finalize a $132 million contract that has drawn criticism from Arlington state representatives, labor groups and the local NAACP chapter.
Vice Chair David Priddy expressed frustration at the recent resistance, which he said was mostly absent when the Board directed staff not to pursue a prevailing wage requirement last summer. Delaying the replacement of the current, aging Career Center building would not be fair to current and future students, he said.
“These kids deserve better,” said Priddy. “We should be celebrating the new building, and instead we’re getting pushback because people would like to put politics over kids.”
With the contract approval, a groundbreaking ceremony is now schedule for Wednesday, May 15. The School Board is set to vote on its name — “The Pike Campus” is the current front runner — the next day.
Former School Board member Tannia Talento spoke in opposition to approving a contract without a labor agreement. Having witnessed many construction projects go over budget, she argued that inadequate pay for workers often causes unexpected costs.
A prevailing wage agreement ensures that workers on a project are paid the average wage that workers performing similar jobs receive. Advocates argue that this protects against wage theft and ultimately has a negligible impact on project costs.
“I’ve never seen bad crops grow from good seeds, and I’ve never seen good crops grow from bad seeds,” Talento said.
An internal memo from last August foresaw an additional $19.6 million in costs if the School Board approved a prevailing wage requirement. This expense, it warned, would require “deleting/altering major portions of the program” to remain within the budget.
The NAACP Arlington Branch and the Virginia chapter of Associated Builders and Contractors penned opposing letters on the issue this week.
The NAACP argued that prevailing wage agreements contribute to the wellbeing and economic stability of workers. But the ABC said they “effectively stifle fair and open competition, chill job creation and prevent taxpayers and owners from getting the best possible construction project at the best possible price.”
Arlington Public Schools staff are currently drafting a prevailing wage resolution that would apply to all future projects of this scale, Superintendent Francisco Durán said yesterday. If approved, this agreement would go into effect Sept. 1.
The county passed a prevailing wage requirement for all projects over $250,000 in 2021, but this doesn’t apply to APS construction.
Though the Career Center will lack such an agreement, Durán said APS contractor Whiting-Turner has agreed to provide additional safeguards against worker exploitation. It will require certified payroll from all subcontractors and will assign personnel to review documents and maintain the quality of the project.
Board member Miranda Turner said she supports prevailing wages on principle and agrees with arguments that “the building is supposed to be a celebration of careers in the trades, which… can only be supported by a reasonable wage.”
“But all these facts were known last year when, as a body, the direction was not to incorporate prevailing wage,” she said. “I don’t think there was anything knowable last year that was overlooked, except that prevailing wage wasn’t prioritized.”
Concerns about costs drove that decision, she said.
Earlier in the process, labor groups had requested an even more expansive labor agreement, which would have had additional requirements.
“In anticipation of the construction of the new Career Center, union representatives met with School Board members in 2022 to recommend a Project Labor Agreement (PLA) that would incorporate participation by small minority-owned contractors, local hiring from underrepresented communities, access to union apprenticeship programs, and good wages and benefits so that construction workers can afford to live in Arlington,” said a March letter signed by four local labor groups.
“We were extremely distressed to learn recently that the School Board rejected the notion of a PLA, and even worse, refused to even incorporate prevailing wage requirements,” the groups wrote.
Said School Board member Bethany Sutton: “This project is caught between how we’ve worked in the past and how we want to work in the future,”
