By Brad Bowman

Sen. Wil Schroder (R-Wilder) has sponsored a prevailing wage bill for two years and he’s prepared to do so again next year as a House committee struck down the bill again Thursday.

The bill would have exempted schools from paying construction workers the average benefits and wages on construction projects of $250,000 or more for educational facilities, which was a sticking point for House Democrats on the committee and a stalemate in the legislature for years.

Schroder testified before the committee with a packed room of union construction workers behind him leaving little standing room.

Kentucky had exempted schools from prevailing wage law from 1982 to 1996, Schroder said and he cited a Legislative Research Commission (LRC) study done last year showing labor costs increased by 51 percent as a result of paying prevailing wage laws.

But the study presented In December 2014, by Mike Clark, chief economist of the LRC, didn’t get enough votes from either Democrats or Republicans on the committee to be adopted.

Bill Finn, director of the Kentucky State Building and Construction Trades Council, along with Charlie McCoy, a retired union worker, quoted statistics from a prevailing wage peer review economic analysis of the state’s 2014 prevailing wage law done by Peter Philips, a professor of economics at the University of Utah.

House Democrats also cited information from other selected prevailing wage studies from 1999-2015 which indicated in states like Wisconsin where prevailing wage legislation is enacted it lowered wages and was offset by reduced productivity.

Many Democrats asked why no one is calling for doing away with prevailing wage for the higher-priced professionals like architects, accountants or engineers involved in school projects instead the lower-paid construction workers.

Tom Shelton, executive director of the Kentucky Association of School Superintendents, has testified in the past favoring the exemption.

In response, other committee members asked Thursday why superintendents and other “top-heavy” administrators in the state’s school districts don’t take a cut in pay if they have concerns about the scarcity of public school money.

The bill died, though six Republicans voted in support of its passage. Thirteen Democrats voted against it as well as Rep. Jim Stewart (R-Flat Lick).

Schroder said the decision wasn’t too much of a surprise.

“I’ll be here to fight another day next session,” Schroder said. “We know that committee makeup is going to change. We have some people retiring and we are going to have some special elections. If you listened to some of the responses today, some of them were very comical comparing apples to oranges.”

Despite the LRC study not being passed by a committee in 2015, Schroder said he thought it was very thorough and may consider having another study conducted.

“It is a picking and choosing of facts. I think we should use the LRC’s study. They don’t have a dog in this fight and we can trust them,” Schroder said. “I will be back with this bill next year and if the House does flip I think we will have a great shot (of getting it passed).”

Director of training and education for the labor unions in Kentucky Edward Willoughby, of Lawrenceburg, used his shoes as an example of his position on the bill.

“I bought these shoes five years ago. They’re made in the United States. They cost me $120 bucks,” Willoughby said. “Today, they are made in China and still cost me $120 bucks. By cutting the wages, it’s still not cutting the cost of the product.”