The acrimony between Republican legislative leaders and the Tomblin administration over prevailing wage has reached a new level. Senate President Bill Cole and House Speaker Tim Armstead used a rarely-invoked authority to issue a subpoena Tuesday to Tomblin’s WorkForce West Virginia division, calling on the agency to turn over all documents related to the agency’s preparation of a new methodology for calculating prevailing wage.
Earlier this year, the Legislature passed and Gov. Tomblin signed into law SB 361, which supporters argued would determine more accurate market-based hourly wages for state taxpayer-funded projects. Critics of the previous method contend the wages were artificially inflated by relying almost exclusively on union pay scales. (The law expired June 30th so West Virginia is currently operating without a prevailing wage.)
In their letter to WorkForce West Virginia delivered yesterday, Cole and Armstead accused the agency of failing to comply fully with earlier requests for all information relevant to the recalculation. “We are extremely disappointed in the lack of candor and completeness that WorkForce West Virginia has demonstrated in its response to these communications.”
MORE: Lawmakers’ letter to WorkForce West Virginia
The GOP leaders argue documents released by WVU and Marshall, which are participating in the development of the new methodology, show the state’s leading construction union, the Affiliated Construction Trades Foundation (ACT), provided information to WorkForce West Virginia. However, WorkForce failed to disclose the correspondence.
Several of those emails came from Lesly Messina, Research Director for ACT, and they included copies of studies that were critical of using Bureau of Labor Statistics figures to determine prevailing wage. (Republicans believe the BLS figures will provide more accurate data on pay scales than surveys, which were used under the old method and the state plans to use again.)
“We know construction, our contractors know industry,” Messina told me. “We had some useful information to give them. We sent it to all the stakeholders.”
Messina said she was just trying to be helpful and she never heard back from WorkForce.
The GOP leaders say the omission of those emails from the initial document release by WorkForce raises their suspicions that the labor union influenced WorkForce by discouraging the agency from relying on BLS data, as required in the new law, and then tried to hide it.
“Such an omission (of the emails) causes us great concern with the accuracy and completeness of your prior response to our records request,” Cole and Armstead said in their letter.
However, the Tomblin administration responded late Tuesday saying Messina’s emails were in the initial document drop, and it released to the public thousands of pages of documents and emails that were turned over earlier to the Joint Committee on Government and Finance. In addition, the governor’s office said “WorkForce officials will again review e-mails to ensure no information was overlooked.”
What’s unclear is where all this is headed. Republican leaders have a growing distrust of WorkForce and how it’s crafting the new methodology for prevailing wage. They suspect labor has influenced the process.
The Tomblin administration does not understand why Republicans are in such a huff, and it stands by WorkForce saying the agency has, and will continue, to comply with the new law.
Stay tuned.