Prevailing wage: Good for workers, good for business

To be clear, if the legislature capitulates and increases the thresholds of our prevailing wage law, it will be a symbolic gesture at best. CCM and our elected officials are under no illusions that weakening wage standards for construction workers won’t realize any significant savings for our municipalities. If CCM were actually committed to lowering […]

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House Democrats To Release New Budget Proposal Tuesday With Increased Sales Tax

House Democrats say the sales tax would increase from the current 6.35 percent, but they said the final rate would be determined after discussions with the party’s caucus. An earlier Democratic proposal called for raising the sales tax to 6.99 percent, but it is widely believed the new proposal would be lower than that. http://www.courant.com/politics/hc-pol-democratic-revised-budget-20170822-story.html

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Mandate relief must accompany municipal-aid cuts

Blindly cutting municipal aid without loosening draconian mandates and labor laws will be counterintuitive, giving municipal leaders little wiggle room to shave costs and forcing local taxpayers to shoulder the burden in the form of higher property taxes. Municipalities have long argued for curtailing the state’s prevailing wage law, which requires municipalities to pay a […]

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Bridgeport Bluefish out, concerts in as city plans revamp of stadium

A Connecticut city plans to convert a stadium currently housing its minor league baseball team into an outdoor venue for concerts. Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim says the city-owned stadium will be redeveloped into an amphitheater with a $15 million investment through a public-private partnership. Developer Howard Saffan says the amphitheater will open in 2019 and […]

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Larson Outlines $1 Trillion Infrastructure Plan That Could Fund Hartford Tunnels

Standing along the Connecticut River Tuesday, Rep. John Larson announced a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that would fund projects across the country — including his $10 billion proposal to tunnel I-91 and I-84 through Hartford — by taxing carbon emissions. The America Wins Act, as Larson is calling the bill, would create between 13 million […]

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Will more states opt out of paying prevailing wages on public construction projects?

Efforts to lock up state & municipal construction projects with prevailing wage and project labor agreements will probably decline over the next four years, predicts Charles Krugel, a management-side labor and employment lawyer and HR counselor in Chicago. “We’ve already seen the chipping away of previous public sector union rights in historically unionized states like Wisconsin and […]

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Congressional Committees Reject Trump’s DOT Transit Cut

Though spending levels are far from final, Senate and House appropriators have generally rejected the sharp cuts President Trump proposed for important infrastructure accounts. Senate appropriators, in unanimously clearing their 2018 DOT-HUD measure, spurned Trump’s proposal to zero-out DOT’s highly popular Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grants and his plan to slash transit capital […]

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Crane counts flying high in major US cities

In its July 2017 North American Crane Index report, construction research firm Rider Levett Bucknall (RLB) counted nearly 400 fixed cranes in use across 14 major North American cities, indicating continued, steady activity in the construction industry.  Cities where crane counts have declined still have projects in the pipeline that could boost construction crane numbers […]

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