Governor Kotek was a guest on OPB’s Think Out Loud today. They covered PLAs as one of their topics and host Dave Miller asked some good questions informed but the info we’ve been putting out there. It begins at just after 21 minutes but we’ve also include a transcript below.
https://www.opb.org/article/2025/03/18/think-out-loud-oregon-governor-tina-kotek
HOST
A week before Christmas, you put out an executive order mandating that state agencies use project labor agreements for most major infrastructure projects. There are some carve outs, and agencies can ask your office for specific ones on a case by case basis, but basically this means that agencies have to enter into agreements with unions before work can begin if, if labor is going to make up, I think 15% of a total project cost. I think that’s that is the line.
As you know, it’s received a lot of pushback from contractors, business groups, and Republican lawmakers. It’s even the subject of a lawsuit now. Why did you sign this order?
KOTEK
The workers who do the job for major construction projects that we as a state own, when they sit down with the companies who do the construction and can come to agreement on how best to compensate workers, what the working conditions are, they will do a better job they were more likely to get to a project that is on time and on budget. And when you are building large scale projects with public dollars, I believe that there should be mutual benefit in the community, and what project labor agreements do is all that they say, sit down, figure this out.
HOST
What does it mean for the workers who are going to do this job?
KOTEK
I think you’re going to see some benefits for the communities that you have not seen, apprenticeship requirements, purchasing locally, all the things that come with having a conversation instead of just saying, Okay, you’re the big contract. You get to make, all the decisions. I think project labor agreements and research has shown that they can be effective, cost effective and beneficial to communities. At the end of the day, this is a little bit of a philosophical difference about do project labor agreements work, or do they not? I tend to believe that they are good for communities, good for projects, and good for the bottom line of the state.
HOST
As you know, though, ODOT studied this two years ago, looking at studies of more than 1000 project labor agreements around the country, and their report had this line. The analysis found the inclusion of a PLA was stronglycorrelated with increased construction cost within the range of 10% to 20% the sense I’ve gotten from looking at reporting about this is you can find studies showing that PLAs did not add to a project’s cost, but there are plenty that show that it did add something to a project’s cost. This is at a time when we’ve just finished talking about the urgent need to very carefully steward public money to pay for roads, but you know, other things as well, housing as well. I think that affordable housing projects would be exempted from that. So I should point that out. But there are a lot of projects that Oregonians will be paying for with their money in the coming years that might be affected by by this. Do you just disagree with these studies showing that that a lot of PLAs seem to have increased overall project costs?
KOTEK
Well, I will be upfront I have not seen all the numbers that you’re referring to. That being said, some of the things that don’t get covered when we talk about overall costs is it, is it the price at which the contract is signed, or what the final cost of the project is? We see massive costs overrun. Sometimes we see adjustments after things have been bid. And what I think project labor agreements do is you get more consistency and efficiency because of the skilled labor and the agreements that are made on the upfront so if there are problems on the work site, they get resolved a lot faster. So again, I think we have different research on this. I believe, at the end of the day, this will be good for communities, good for the projects themselves, and it’s a way of us stewarding public dollars in a way that we haven’t been doing. There’s been a lot of inconsistency in this area, and my executive orders is to provide guidelines. We do have some exemptions, because some projects, if they’re very simple projects, it might not make a lot of sense when you when you have a very high cost complex project. A project labor agreement’s going to be helpful.