Any California local government seeking help from the state should know that union lobbyists won’t let the legislature pass anything unless unions have their own interests satisfied in the process. The Monterey County Water Resources Agency learned this lesson the hard way: it has now withdrawn support for its own bill after the State Building...

Today (July 8, 2014), the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to negotiate a Project Labor Agreement (disguised as a “Project Stabilization Agreement) with the Tri-Counties Building and Construction Trades Council for Phase II of construction of the county’s North Branch Jail and for the Sheriff’s Transition and Reentry (S.T.A.R.) Complex. These would...

UPDATE – July 29, 2015: According to a Facebook post of the Ventura County Star “VCS School Watch,” “about 140 workers are on site six days a week, preparing the $78.2 million Rancho Campana High School for its opening Sept. 2.” And according to a July 29, 2015 Ventura County Star article (“Frantic Pace Kept...

Proponents of a proposed $447 million new “entertainment and sports center” in downtown Sacramento for the Kings professional basketball team claim the arena itself would generate over 4,000 full-time jobs, including employees hired temporarily for construction, employees for operations of the arena, and other outside service jobs related to arena events and activities. Proponents also...

On January 22, 2014, the North Bay Business Journal (covering Sonoma, Marin, and Napa counties in California) began an on-line “Pulse Poll” asking readers to vote on whether they supported a proposed government mandate for construction contractors to sign a Project Labor Agreement with unions as a condition of working on Sonoma County projects over...

Even close observers of the California High-Speed Rail Authority have struggled to track developments for the state’s planned bullet train. The debacle began in November 2008, when 52.7% of California voters approved Proposition 1A and triggered serious planning for what could be the most expensive construction project in human history. With that kind of money...

Elections matter. The November 2012 election was a disaster on the state and local level for advocates of economic and personal freedom in California. It was a culmination of setbacks going back to the November 1996 election and only mildly interrupted by the recall of Governor Gray Davis in October 2003. Construction trade unions entered...

A September 17, 2013 article in www.UnionWatch.org reported on “the end of public deliberation and votes for Project Labor Agreements in the legislative branch of state and local governments. Instead, backroom deals are made in the executive branch to give unions control of the work.” Now another union strategy has been discovered for evading public scrutiny:...

Only a few advocates of fiscal responsibility and limited government have comprehensively and widely engaged in the business of state and local governments in California over many years. They recognize with dismay that union leaders and their cronies have become adept at evading the constraints of republican constitutional government. Unions have learned how to circumvent...

A common and enduring complaint of the political Left is that constitutional structures established in the country’s republican form of government hinder progress and subvert the democratic will of the people. According to such thinking, those constitutional structures need to be reformed and modernized so that government can be more “democratic.” A few astute political observers...