[Update, 5/10/24:]
Arlington School Board members May 9 voted 4-0 to authorize nearly $140 million in construction contracts for the new Arlington Career Center, setting the stage for ground-breaking ceremonies to take place on May 15.
Board members do plan to consider issues brought up by labor activists when it comes to planning for future projects, but said it was unreasonable to retroactively apply them to the Career Center, which would likely lead to a year's delay in construction in order to re-bid the contract.
"This project is caught between how we've worked in the past and how we want to work in the future," board member Bethany Sutton said.
Acting School Board chairman David Priddy closed the discussion with a not-too-veiled criticism of those who wanted to hold up the effort over the labor provisions, specifically a "prevailing wage" requirement.
"People would like to put politics over kids – I'm choosing students over politics," he said, noting long delays already in getting the project moving.
Mary Kadera and Miranda Turner also voted in favor of the construction contract. School Board Chairman Cristina Diaz-Torres, who is on maternity leave through June, did not take part in the discussion or vote.
School officials are planning a ground-breaking ceremony on May 15 at 10 a.m. Whether labor activists will stop by to voice their displeasure with the approval remains to be seen.
More coverage to come.
[Original coverage, 5/6/24:]
Labor activists may end up on the losing end of their battle with the Arlington School Board over the new Arlington Career Center construction project.
But they aren’t going down without a fight.
A coalition of groups is planning a protest the evening of May 6 at the Career Center, part of a last-minute effort to convince School Board members to attempt to amend the proposed construction contract for what will be Arlington’s most expensive (and in some ways its most delayed) school project ever.
The Northern Virginia AFL-CIO, D.C. Metro Building Trades and Arlington NAACP are slated to participate in the event, which will be held three days before School Board action on the construction contract with Whiting-Turner Construction is slated to take place.
Labor advocates want the contract to include more labor-friendly provisions. If that requires re-bidding the project, they say that is the price that will have to be paid.
But at an April 25 School Board meeting, staff said going back to re-bid the project could delay the project by a year. If the contract is approved May 9, construction work will start almost immediately.
Caught in the middle, School Board members on April 25 seemed to be searching for a middle ground, finding a way to include language in the contract that might be acceptable to both the activists and Whiting-Turner. But Superintendent Francisco Durán and his staff are recommending no changes to the contract proposal that was disseminated in advance of the April 25 meeting.
The recommendation is for a $132.5 million construction contract to Whiting-Turner along with a contract of $4.8 million for construction-management services to Turner & Townsend Heery.
