Read Our Letter to the Prince William County Board of Supervisors
Download a copy here:
Dear Chair Jefferson and Members of the Board of Supervisors:
The Virginia Coalition for Fair Contracting & Employee Protection (“Virginians for Fairness”) is a 501(c)(4) organization that advocates for open, competitive bid processes on public procurements in the Commonwealth. Our coalition represents more than 1,000 Virginia construction firms across multiple industry sectors, opposed to government-mandated Project Labor Agreements (“PLAs”), which limit bid competition, exclude most Virginia contractors, significantly increase the cost of public infrastructure, and usually result in workers taking home less in wages and benefits.
Given our opposition to government-mandated PLAs, we have serious concerns about Item 5B on the Board’s October 28 agenda – a proposal to transfer $300,000 in local taxpayer funds from the County’s contingency account to hire expensive consultants to evaluate county projects for PLA consideration and develop recommendations to amend the County’s procurement regulations to include PLAs. This is an egregious waste of taxpayer funds, and we urge the Board to reject this proposal.
We recently raised similar concerns with the Prince William County School Board following its decision to mandate a PLA on the County’s 14th high school project - an unprecedented move for any school construction project in Virginia. In that letter, we emphasized that PLAs increase project costs, limit competition, and provide no measurable benefit to local workers. Unfortunately, this proposed expenditure by the Board of County Supervisors continues down the same costly path - this time before a single PLA has even been imposed.
Independent research confirms that government-mandated PLAs consistently drive-up public construction costs. The RAND Corporation, a respected nonpartisan research institution, studied government-mandated PLAs in Los Angeles’s affordable-housing program and, in both 2021 and 2024, found that they increased project costs by about 21 percent and delayed completion times by 27 percent.[1] Although RAND’s analysis focused exclusively on affordable housing, the mechanism driving those cost increases - reduced bid competition - applies to public construction generally. In Virginia, that dynamic is even more pronounced because most Virginia-based contractors will not bid on projects that require a PLA due to the financial and operational risks involved. Those added costs directly impact taxpayers by diverting scarce public funds away from essential priorities like schools, roads, and public safety.
Some public officials argue that the extra costs associated with PLAs are worth it because they mistakenly believe that workers on PLA projects earn more and have better benefits. This is a myth. Virginians for Fairness recently conducted a comparison of the wages and benefits that workers take home under a PLA and those they would take home under the standard Prevailing Wage requirement (i.e., without a PLA). In almost every case, worker wages and benefits – that they actually earn and actually take home – are lower under a PLA. That’s because workers on a PLA project are generally required to pay a portion of their take home wage to the union and because certain employer required payments are falsely labeled employee “benefits” even though they benefit the union, not the worker. In short, most workers take home less under a PLA than they would without the PLA. A copy of our analysis is attached.
The non-partisan, independent, and peer-reviewed research on PLAs is publicly available and unambiguous - PLAs add both cost and complexity to public projects. The County shouldn’t need to waste $300,000 on an expensive consultant to tell them the obvious. Thus, we urge the Board to reject this unnecessary expenditure of taxpayer funds.
Thank you for your time and consideration of this matter. We would welcome the opportunity to discuss this issue further and serve as a resource to the Board as it evaluates its procurement policies.
Sincerely,
THE VIRGINIA COALITION FOR FAIR CONTRACTING & EMPLOYEE PROTECTION