PDF: Proposed jobs ordinance
The City Council voted 8-0 Tuesday night to defer for two weeks looking at an ordinance that could give more preference to local contractors because of objections that it is not strong enough.
“I would like to see it deferred,” Councilwoman Pam Ladd said during a legal and legislative committee meeting.
A small contingent of local labor groups attended the meeting to voice concerns about the measure. Jimmy Rodgers, attorney for the Chattanooga Building and Construction Trades Council and the Chattanooga Area Labor Council, said he wanted at least a two-week deferral to study the proposed change to the ordinance.
Mr. Rodgers said the groups had just heard about the change and wanted time to find some type of “middle ground.”
Current city ordinances on hiring state that companies must meet 13 criteria in order for their bids to be accepted. The ordinance change would place a fourteenth amendment, which states “when all of the requirements hereinabove are comparable, award may be made to a bidder providing more local resources or labor.”
Mr. Rodgers criticized the ordinance Tuesday, saying it had “no teeth” and made hiring local labor an “afterthought.”
“It shouldn’t be a ‘may be’ considered,” he said. “It should be a ‘shall.'”
He said he also thinks that tacking the amendment on as fourteenth line item waters down the value of hiring locally.
Dan Johnson, chief of staff for Mayor Ron Littlefield, said the city follows state law that says all bids go the “best and lowest” bid. He said the ordinance is trying to just put a little more emphasis on what the city already does.
LOCAL HIREA proposed addition to the city’s ordinance on hiring procedures reads:”When all of the requirements hereinabove are comparable, award may be made to a bidder providing more local resources or labor.”
“The current practice has always been to give preferential treatment to local contractors,” he said.
Mr. Rodgers and the labor groups tried unsuccessfullly over the summer to push a local hire ordinance through the council that would have given incentives to any local contractors within a 75-mile radius.
He said the new “alternative” version of that ordinance does not stand up on its own.
“You need something that has some meaning and has some teeth,” he said.