Local groups approaching local governments about hiring local

Check and balance illegals

Some local businesses feel too much local work is being outsourced to workers outside the county or even the country. So the independent Building and Design Council, along with the Crested Butte-Mt. Crested Butte Chamber of Commerce, will be asking local governments to deliberately hire people who live in the valley when awarding new projects.
The group will first approach the Crested Butte Town Council at its October 4 meeting and ask the town to adopt a “local hiring policy.”

“We will eventually approach the town of Mt. Crested Butte, the city and county of Gunnison,” explained Chamber of Commerce operations and member relations manager Kristen Van Hoesen. “This came out of a roundtable discussion when we first started Think Local First. This is an independent group but the chamber helped facilitate this discussion. It’s in our interest as well. A hire-local policy encourages local hiring.”
In the formal proposal being presented to the government boards, the group states, “The objective of a Local Hiring Policy is to create jobs for local people and to avoid outsourcing when the skills and talent necessary for publicly funded projects are readily available locally. A second objective is to evaluate the presence of legal labor standards locally and the policies in place to enforce laws pertaining to such.”
“We have got a ton of feedback that the public and private entities are outsourcing too much,” Van Hoesen said. “From the Four-way Stop improvements and the local school expansion in town, the recent construction work at the Mt. Crested Butte Water and Sanitation district and a lot of the CBMR projects, there has been a lot of work from out-of-town companies and workers. Even the performing arts center design in Mt. Crested Butte was outsourced. We heard loud and clear that people are going elsewhere for products, services and employees.”
The proposal suggests that governments make local hiring a “requirement” for at least a portion of any public project; give local companies “bonus points” when being considered for projects; or “weight” local companies as a preferred choice. The building and design council would like to see the weighting option adopted.
“Weighting is applicable in a small community where living expenses, property costs and costs of doing business may be greater than other areas. Adding weight for ‘local’ levels the playing field, in essence, allowing locals to bid competitively,” the proposal states.
As for the elephant in the room, Van Hoesen hopes a dialogue can be opened up. “Illegal labor is a sensitive issue but there is a big and growing concern regarding it,” said Van Hoesen. “I hear more and more and more that it is a big issue. With the town, their projects require contractors to sign a document that only legal labor is used, but no one is checking on that. It’s a sensitive subject but we hope to open the conversation and look for a check and balance.”
The proposal will be presented at the public comment portion of the Town Council meeting on Monday, October 4. For a look at the official proposal, go to crestedbuttenews.com.