The new year rings in the arrival of a costly state mandate that will prompt some private developers to reconsider breaking ground on any planned construction projects in New York.

Construction costs began climbing when the pandemic arrived in early 2020. They’ve stayed high due to inflated material costs, supply-chain constraints and a worker shortage. That labor scarcity will get worse in the coming months as laborers, foremen, carpenters, electricians and other tradesmen are drawn in to support new public-construction projects across New York City and the state that secure a share of the tens of billions of dollars coming to the region courtesy of November’s $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure law.

To this mix, add an expensive new legislative mandate on private construction former Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law in April 2020. Effective Jan. 1, it extends to many private projects New York’s misnamed “prevailing wage” regime — a costly drain on the public purse historically applicable only to contractors working on public projects.

Read the full op-ed in the New York Post.

You may also like

NY’s ‘prevailing’ protection racket

Few public policies carry a more misleading moniker than New York’s “prevailing wage” law for public works projects — a job-destroying cost-escalator that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the State Legislature may be on the verge of expanding as part of their impending state budget deal. Read More

Blame unions for New York’s pricey giveaway to Amazon

The state-city deal to bring one of Amazon’s two new headquarters to Long Island City might at least have provided New York City with another big benefit—a much-needed model of advanced, efficient building practices. After all, Amazon isn’t just a big corporation: It’s widely admired as a global leader in technological innovation. Instead, it appears the deal will ensure that Amazon is saddled with the same arcane and outmoded construction-union work rules and compensation levels that have saddled New York City with the nation’s highest urban construction costs. Read More

Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion was beyond corrupt

The overarching scandal here wasn’t bid-rigging or the pay-to-play pattern in the developers’ contributions to the governor’s reelection campaign. At the root was a simply awful public policy — corporate welfare on steroids — that neither Cuomo nor most of his critics have definitively renounced, even now. Read More

NY wastes billions on ‘prevailing wage’ construction jobs

New York state, its local governments and public authorities are committed to spending tens of billions of dollars on public works in the next five to 10 years. But under current law, they’re also committed to wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on public works — to subsidize the above-market compensation of the state’s shrinking but politically influential construction unions. Read More

Cuomo’s SolarCity Disaster

Earlier this month, Gov. Cuomo paid a visit to the centerpiece of his upstate economic development strategy: a massive, still unfinished “gigafactory” taxpayers spent $750 million to build and equip for SolarCity, a money-losing company with a foggy future. “This is the economy of tomorrow,” the governor gushed, according to a Buffalo News account. “It’s such a metaphor — a symbol of everything we’re doing.” Indeed. But rather than symbolizing a shiny high-tech future, the solar-panel factory could become a monument to what US Attorney Preet Bharara described as “pervasive corruption and fraud” allegedly infecting Cuomo’s signature economic development programs. Read More