PRESS RELEASE
May 10, 2016
Contact: Eric Christen, (858) 431-6337

Coalition to Oppose Massive $850 School Bond at Tonight’s Long Beach City College Meeting
Bond has been reduced by at least 10% thanks to Board of Trustees’ payoff to big labor special interests.

Long Beach, CA – At tonight’s Long Beach City College meeting the Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction (CFEC) will call out the Board of Trustees for their support of a wasteful and discriminatory Long Beach Community College District Project Labor Agreement 2016.

A PLA would force workers to pay union dues, pay into union pension plans, be hired through a union hiring hall, and would explicitly forbid non-union apprentices from working at all.

“In this day and age where we see people from every aisle of the political spectrum disgusted with political payoffs from special interest groups, the Long Beach Community College District Board of Trustees have shown a tone-deafness by giving big labor special interests a monopoly on all this work, thereby decreasing the value of each tax dollar” said Eric Christen, executive director of the Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction (CFEC).

In 2011 the National University System Institute for Policy Research conducted a study of PLAs and the impact they had on school construction costs in California. They found that PLAs increased construction costs 13-15%.

We ask this: why would the Trustees vote now on such a measure when their last bond Measure E, worth $515 million, didn’t have any acknowledged problems?

At a time when other competing tax measures are on the ballot and when taxpayers are conserving every penny, the Board of Trustees instead chose to put special interests ahead of the interests of their hard-working constituents.

CFEC’s Eric Christen will be speaking at the Long Beach City College District Board of Trustees meeting tonight, May 10th. The meeting will be held at the Liberal Arts Campus – Building T – Room 1100. The address is 4901 E. Carson Street, Long Beach, CA 90808.

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Communication to Long Beach Community College District Board of Trustees

Subject: Why we will be opposing Measure LB: Your Vote for a Union-Only PLA

Date: May 10, 2016 at 1:52:23 PM PDT

Dear LBCCD Board of Trustees,

Your vote on April 26 to place a union-crafted Project Labor Agreement (PLA) on your future construction bond work has forced us to educate voters about what this means for their tax dollars. PLAs are highly discriminatory and the most controversial issue facing the construction industry in America today. Big labor special interests push PLAs as a way to eliminate non-union competition from work covered by PLAs thus driving up the costs of these projects. A moment of research would have allowed you to discover this, and in fact we have sent you a large amount of data on PLAs and why they have no place in a just and equitable society.  Yet you persisted.

Now you are asking the taxpayers of your community to approve a $850 million construction bond that, because of the PLA, will be reduced in value by up to 15% Already you have had to spend money just to oversee the PLA by putting out an RFP for a PLA manager. This is only the beginning of the nightmare. As you can read in the series of L.A. Times stories on the nightmare that took place under the Los Angeles Community College District’s PLA (again, does anyone on your board do any research, at all?) PLAs benefit one group and one group only: union bosses.

Because of your failure to take your fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers seriously, not to mention your failure to protect the rights of all workers, we have been forced to educate voters in your district as to why they should think seriously about supporting your new tax.

Tonight we will announce this effort which will aggressively be implemented over the next 30 days.

You have no one but yourselves and your canine affection for union boss demands to blame for this situation.

Waste, fraud, abuse, and discrimination have no place in 2016 America.

Eric Christen

Executive Director

Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction