Senator Questions O.C. Labor Pact

A U.S. senator traveled from Capitol Hill to Orange County on Monday to kick up some dust in his campaign to forbid exclusive labor union pacts on federally funded construction projects.

Exhibit 1 for Sen. Tim Hutchinson (R-Arkansas): A sweeping five-year agreement that Orange County supervisors approved in January that requires union workers on nearly all county construction projects.

Hutchinson questioned the legality of Orange County’s new union with organized labor, which some skeptical South County activists have condemned as a marriage of convenience to bolster support for a commercial airport at the former El Toro Marine base.

Most labor agreements apply to individual public works projects, but Orange County’s deal covers all general contracts worth more than $225,000. The pact expires in 2005.

“The board may well have crossed the legal use of such a project-labor agreement,” Hutch inson said during the field hearing of the Senate Subcommittee of Employment, Safety and Training. “But that will ultimately be settled by the courts.”

Hutchinson was the only Senate committee member at the hearing, which he arranged after Orange County’s labor agreement caught his staff’s attention.

“I grew up thinking that Orange County was this bastion of conservatism,” said Hutchinson, a former history teacher elected to the U.S. Senate in 1997. “So you wouldn’t think this would be the birthplace for one of the most far-reaching agreements in the country.”