Board leaders want to mandate PLAs on every construction project costing $40 million or more before their own pilot projects have produced results.
Read the agenda item here.
Loudoun County is preparing to ram through a sweeping government-mandated Project Labor Agreement (PLA) policy with virtually no advance notice to the contractors and taxpayers who will pay the price.
At its November 5 meeting, the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors will consider Agenda Item 14.i, of its November 5 meeting agenda, a proposal from Chair Phyllis Randall and Vice Chair Michael Turner to require a PLA on every County construction contract or bid valued at $40 million or more. Projects below that threshold could also be subjected to PLAs at the Board's discretion.
Rather than scheduling a dedicated public hearing, Board leaders have placed this sweeping mandate on the November 5 business meeting agenda as an action item.
This is an egregious breach of public trust. A sweeping change to how the County spends hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars should not be rushed through as a last-minute Board initiative without meaningful advance public scrutiny.
What makes this maneuver especially outrageous is that Loudoun County has not even completed its own PLA experiment.
In May, the County's Finance Committee recommended pilot PLAs on two projects: the Adult Detention Center Phase III and Route 15 North Widening. The stated process included regular staff updates to evaluate the experience and identify problems.
Neither pilot has produced completed results demonstrating that PLAs benefit Loudoun taxpayers. Yet Chair Randall and Vice Chair Turner now want to make PLAs mandatory across the County's largest construction projects.
Why bother with a pilot program if the Board has already decided the outcome?
The County already has evidence that PLA mandates discourage competition. Its own survey of contractors found that more than half of respondents who had previously performed County work would not bid on projects requiring a PLA.
Loudoun has also experienced the consequences firsthand. In October 2025, the County canceled a government building procurement after contractors sued over its PLA mandate.
And in 2023, County staff explicitly recommended against implementing PLAs, warning that they could reduce competition and that the County had not demonstrated a clear public benefit.
The Board knows these risks. It has its own survey, its own staff warnings, and a failed procurement to prove it. Now it wants to impose PLAs on an even larger scale.
Perhaps most astonishingly, the proposed Board Member Initiative acknowledges that the fiscal impact is "unknown at this time."
The Board is being asked to mandate PLAs on every major construction project without knowing what the policy will cost taxpayers, whether it will reduce competition, or whether its own pilot projects will succeed.
This looks less like responsible public procurement and more like a political payoff to organized labor, pushed through before the public has a meaningful chance to object.
Qualified contractors should be allowed to compete for public work without being forced to accept government-mandated PLAs.
The Board should reject this last-minute mandate and honor its commitment to evaluate the pilot projects before imposing a policy that threatens fair and open competition.
TAKE ACTION TODAY: Contractors who have previously performed work for Loudoun County, local businesses, and anyone who believes public procurement should remain free, fair, and open should contact the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors immediately. Urge supervisors to vote NO on Agenda Item 14.i at today's November 5 meeting and reject this attempt to impose a sweeping PLA mandate without meaningful public scrutiny.