County misguided on storm-shelter labor issue

An architect from a large city has been doing the work on the project instead of hiring a local one. This is comparable to outsourcing American labor to foreign countries, but on a much smaller scale.

This architect is telling the commissioners that they should be able to stay under budget with the right personnel, so the commissioners have decided to hire more county employees to oversee the project and to build it. They say this can be done for much less than hiring professionals to do the work because the county is exempt from paying prevailing wage to workers.

For those of you out there that don’t know what prevailing wage is, it’s where our government dictates the amount paid to each worker on the actual job site, forcing contractor proposal amounts to swell to abnormal levels. None of the monetary increase of these bids is profit, it is an operating expense. Why doesn’t the county government have to pay the same amount in wages that they force contractors to pay their employees?

That it is cheaper to hire more government employees than to hire trained professionals is laughable. This action results in not only a loss to the economy, but also invokes a cost. The presiding officials continually sidestep hiring professionals by taking on projects themselves and using or hiring more government employees to complete them. They seem to be under the mistaken impression that government labor is free and even more astounding, that it would be of the same quality as privately/publicly owned companies.

In this situation, more government contributes to weakening the economy through decreased revenue for businesses, which equals less taxes paid to the city. It also burdens the taxpayers with additional costs incurred to hire more government employees that aren’t needed.

Amber A. Spade

Green Ridge