BY LARRY L. ROBERTS
DECEMBER 30, 2016 12:36 PM
Recently, Kentucky Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Dave Adkisson penned a column with his Christmas wish list of low-road pro-business issues he expects the GOP to address in the 2017 General Assembly.
While I am not surprised by Adkisson’s support for repeal of Kentucky’s prevailing-wage law, I am surprised he relied upon a flawed draft report to substantiate repeal of something as important to the economy as prevailing wage.
The report he referenced was not adopted by the Kentucky legislature’s Program Review and Investigations Committee at its Dec. 16, 2014 meeting for a variety of reasons. The report was not an accounting of construction costs; it was a back-of-the-envelope hypothetical calculation about wages – and wages only.
There was no consideration of whether or not projects were completed on time. There was no consideration of cost overruns. There was no consideration of productivity of low-wage contractors and there was no consideration of downstream maintenance cost.