Read Our Op-Ed in InsideNova
The following appears in the November 24, 2025 edition of InsideNova. Click here to read it there.
A $300,000 study no one asked for
By Patrick Dean / Associated Builders & Contractors – Va Chapter
Hold onto your wallets, Prince William County. The Board of County Supervisors is plowing ahead in pursuit of a new policy to mandate inflationary Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) on county projects.
At their Oct. 28 meeting, supervisors voted 5-2 to spend $300,000 of your money on expensive consultants to “study” whether mandated PLAs make sense for the county. (Spoiler alert: They don’t.)
A mandated PLA forces local contractors to use union labor and make payments to union trust funds and results in workers taking home less pay. While politicians have concocted a number of easily refutable justifications for PLAs, these unnecessary agreements really serve one purpose: to reward union advocates for their generous political support.
But these pay-for-play schemes come with a massive cost for taxpayers – i.e., you.
Independent, peer-reviewed research continually shows that by thwarting real, authentic bid competition, PLAs significantly drive up construction costs.
How much? The RAND Corp., one of the nation’s most respected nonpartisan research institutions, examined Los Angeles’ $1 billion affordable housing program in both 2021 and 2024. RAND found that the PLA imposed by the city council increased the cost of each affordable unit funded by the project by roughly 21% and completion times were delayed by 27%.
Think about that. Thanks to its politically inspired PLA mandate, Los Angeles taxpayers received only 80 new units of affordable housing for every 100 they paid for. And now some local supervisors want to bring these results to Prince William.
It gets worse. Our analysis of worker pay shows that nearly all workers working on a PLA project will take home less pay than they would without the PLA. That’s because county construction projects are already subject to the county’s prevailing wage ordinance. In other words, the wages and benefits paid on county projects usually match or exceed those contained in union collective bargaining agreements (CBAs).
But union deductions, ranging from 3% to 6% of hourly wages, and contributions to union political funds and programs mandated by these CBAs, consistently erode real take-home pay for workers. When these payments to the union are accounted for, employees working under a PLA take home less than they would under current law.
Finally, there’s the issue of fairness. The public is best served when procurements are open, fair and transparent. It’s the bedrock of a healthy procurement system and how we guard against cronyism and favoritism in public contracting. PLAs upend this system entirely by effectively ensuring that only some contractors, usually those with existing union agreements, can bid on county projects.
There are a lot of reasons why PLA mandates are wrong for Prince William and the commonwealth. Our coalition is dedicated to educating public officials and the public about the truth behind the recent PLA push.