The Obama administration talks a lot about putting people back to work through shovel-ready projects, yet a recent ruling by the administration is actually stalling work on projects in Colorado.
More than 20 drinking-water and wastewater projects already underway or ready to start have been either complicated, stalled or outright sent back to the drawing board because the Environmental Protection Agency abruptly ended a longtime exemption to wage requirements without warning. Here’s a tip for our federal government: When you make significant changes to the rules, only apply them to the game as it’s played going forward.
The EPA says it is acting at the behest of Congress, but we think the agency has seriously erred and should rethink its ruling.
In October, Congress passed and President Obama signed a 2010 appropriations bill that funds agencies, including the EPA, and in doing so enacted a new application of the so-called Davis-Bacon Act, which has created the dilemma.
The Depression-era Davis-Bacon law requires federal contracts — or projects funded by federal money, grants or loans — to pay workers “prevailing wages.” But in the past those requirements were never part of the loans to state and local government for drinking-water and wastewater infrastructure.
But the same Congress that passed the $787 billion stimulus bill — and which insisted upon Davis-Bacon for how those funds were spent — decided to apply the requirements more broadly in its 2010 appropriations.
But in interpreting the new language, the EPA also is requiring that Davis-Bacon apply retroactively to projects begun in 2009.
The result is that projects like a $27 million wastewater facility in Glenwood Springs have now hit the skids. The city already had approved terms of a low-interest EPA loan before Obama signed the new appropriations bill into law, but hadn’t yet completed the transaction. The loan application did not include provisions for paying workers government-defined prevailing wages.
“To get blindsided retroactively at the last minute is just an example, to me, of why people lose faith in government,” Glenwood Springs Mayor Bruce Christensen told the Glenwood Springs Post Independent.
The Colorado Municipal League argues the EPA’s interpretation will add significant delays and costs to other projects, and Sen. Mark Udall has asked EPA administrator Lisa Jackson to resolve the matter. But the EPA tells us the agency is obligated to enforce the new requirements.
No reasonable person would expect the agency to interpret new funding requirements to apply to 2009-era and earlier projects. Jackson ought to consider the harm being done, and rethink her position.
