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A closer look at the MTA’s Red Line jobs-creation report

January 7, 2010 at 3:02 pm 8

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by GERALD NEILY

There’s some irony to the recent city government report revealed in today’s Sun which trumpets the nearly 10,000 jobs they say would be created by the proposed Red Line east-west transit line project.

An earlier Maryland Transit Administration report, aimed at showing how cost effective the Red Line would be, basically strove to show it would be designed to pay less-than-prevailing wages and attract big national construction firms rather than small local ones. Not such great news for the local workforce.

The piece in today’s Baltimore Sun doesn’t say why the Maryland Transit Administration’s Red Line plan would be any better at creating jobs than any other recycling of $1.6 Billion of the taxpayers’ money back to the region. It’s all part of Baltimore’s fierce competition with the rest of the country, including with the Prince George’s/Montgomery County Purple Line, for federal transit funds.

This competition is why the MTA needs to show it will keep wages down and big-scale efficiency up. To win a 50/50 share of the available federal cash, the MTA must demonstrate that its Red line project would be “cost effective” and avoid cost overruns. This includes a document prepared for the MTA this past August called the “Risk Assessment Report”.

The Risk Assessment documents how the MTA has declined to create a Project Labor Agreement to assure paying prevailing wages, and is also resisting efforts by the Associated General Contractors to minimize the size of contract packages to accommodate small local businesses. The MTA wants to entice big national contractors to save labor costs and red tape associated with more contracts for smaller local contractors.

Meanwhile, what’s really important is to demonstrate that the MTA’s Red Line will create a cogent and comprehensive transit system to foster true long-term re-development, something which in my opinion the MTA has utterly failed to do.

  • Nate Payer

    By the rationale the study gives, as reported in the Sun, spending $1.6 billion on any infrastructure would be good for the local economy–whether the project makes sense or not. This is just pork barrel now. Spending $1.6 billion to complete the devastating I-70 would get the same “results”, no?

  • marin

    I’m not quite sure where Neily arrives at his conclusion that MTA desires to pay “less than prevailing wages” on the Red Line. In fact, Davis-Bacon requires that prevailing-wage be paid on all federal contracts. Once again, Neily is just plain wrong

  • geraldneily

    Marin, it seems every time I shed some light on one of the City government’s transportation ventures, you always come up with some beside-the-point argument, previously about my former career as a city bureaucrat or now about Davis-Bacon, as if that law rendered moot all labor negotiations.

    OK, I now realize that the term “prevailing wages” has a specific legal meaning under Davis-Bacon, so I shouldn’t have used it, but it in no way replaces the full complexity of labor relations that the MTA must deal with and which determine economic costs and impacts.

    If you are really interested in the subject of labor costs for the Red Line, instead of arguing with me, you should actually check out the MTA “Risk Assessment Report” which I cited – a serious document dealing with a serious subject, cataloguing various potential cost overruns, of which labor costs are a significant part.

    On the other hand, the City government actually has no direct stake in potential Red Line cost overruns. If the cost escalates, the State of Maryland and its taxpayers (all of us) would be left holding the bag, while the City government could chalk up the extra costs as just more “economic benefit” to plug into their formula.

  • Pingback: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs « A Baltimore Block

  • marin

    Well, Neily, you’ve got a big mouthpiece here on the Brew. And when your facts are wrong, as they so often are, they can’t be left unchallenged.

    And of course, the City has an interest in preventing cost overruns — as those would undermine the credibility of future projects.

    Now, where would one find this ‘Risk Assessment Report’ you mention???

  • marin

    Radio silence from neily. Why won’t the Brew force Neily to produce the report verifying his claims? Shame on the Brew

    • Editor

      Patience Marin, we’re going to show it to you……..!

  • Steve

    Cat fight, yeah!

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