Quincy board voted unanimously in June to challenge the Labor Department's rate

By HOLLY WAGNER

Herald-Whig Staff Writer

Learning how the Department of Labor sets the county's prevailing wage convinced two Quincy School Board members that it's worthwhile to pursue a legal means for Adams County's taxing bodies to establish their own prevailing wage scale.

At the least, they say, taxpayers deserve to know more about the process and its result.

School Board members Jeff Mays and Glenn Bemis, along with Quincy attorney David Penn, visited with representatives of the DOL Aug. 14 to learn how it sets the prevailing wage that every taxing body must agree to pay on public works construction projects.

"The department is unabashed in saying, 'Our directive is strictly to look at what has been paid in that county on public works, period,' " Mays said. "It affirmed our position that we're paying way more than we ought to."

Mays and Bemis spent a year studying the prevailing wage rate paid in Adams County and concluded that salaries average about 22 percent higher than the county's median wage for the same professional categories, as figured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Their study showed the median wage would have saved taxpayers about $528,000 on $7 million of work this summer.

Citing "no factual or reasonable basis for the prevailing wage rates and worker wage" for Adams County, the Quincy School District voted unanimously in June to challenge the Labor Department's rate after formally adopting the prevailing wage. It then filed an objection with the Illinois Department of Labor on how the wages are set.

The prevailing wage is intended to represent what is paid to construction workers locally, but it is based on union wages that are higher than wages paid to non-union workers. The prevailing wage also includes the cost of union pensions, vacations and training.

"(DOL) didn't take issue with the fact that it costs a heck of a lot more for taxpayers to do public construction," Mays said. "It's clear that there's a major, major difference in cost to the taxpayer on public projects versus their own projects in their own home, and that is attributable to the process that has evolved in wage setting in this state on public projects."

Based on the interview, Penn eventually will make a legal recommendation. Mays hopes that by working together with other taxing bodies in the county, the gap between the prevailing wage and median wage in Adams County can be closed somewhat.

"We need to do our due diligence to do everything we can to save the district some money," Bemis said.

"There's every opportunity to go forward with this thing," Mays said.

-- hwagner@whig.com/221-3374