Wick's Law Reform in New York
Issue Overview: Wick's law requires that state and municipalities separately bid the plumbing, heating, electrical and HVAC work on public construction projects exceeding $50,000. Multiple bidding has had the effect of increasing overall construction costs by an estimated 8-30 percent, delaying projects and, in some cases, preventing projects from going forward at all.
NFIB Position: Our members voiced support for Wick's Law reform through the Member Ballot. However, the Wick's Law reform legislation that the Governor and Legislature negotiated ended up being worse than the status quo, and we ultimately opposed it.
Issue Status: We initially supported former Gov. Spitzer's proposal to reform the costly and onerous Wick's Law for the state, municipalities, school districts and public authorities by increasing the current thresholds from $50,000 to a more practical $1 million for upstate municipalities and to $2 million for New York City projects. The new limits would also have been indexed to inflation. While we supported this proposal as an important first step toward reforming the costly Wick's Law, the proposal was later changed to not only lower the thresholds but also to inject project labor agreements (PLAs), apprenticeship mandates and prequalification into these public construction project. Not only are these provisions potentially more costly than the original Wick's provisions, but they would also discriminate against the participation of non-union businesses in such projects. We succeeded in stopping this language as included in stand-alone legislation last year, but this year it was included in the final enacted budget. Sen. George Winner and Assemblyman Robin Schimminger have introduced legislation (S.8321/A.11397) to repeal the PLA provisions, but the Legislature adjourned before the bill was acted upon. We will continue to fight to strike the unfair and anti-competitive PLA provisions and other language that largely prevents small business, open shop participation in public construction projects.
