A meeting of a City Council – County Legislature – City School District committee had lots of questions about why a project labor agreement for Rochester’s huge city school modernization plan was scrapped earlier this month. They didn’t find any answers.
About 50 people attended the meeting of the 3,3,3 Ad Hoc Education Committee. They wanted to know why Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren’s appointees to the the Rochester Joint Schools and Construction Board shot down the labor agreement. It set minimum wage standards for Phase-2 of the billion-dollar plus upgrade of city school buildings … and specified how much of the project should be done by local labor and by minority and women-owned businesses.
None of the four board members who voted against the PLA showed up.
Mayor Warren has not spoken about the issue publicly. In the past she’s said the job training and minority-hiring provisions in the first phase labor agreement didn’t work out to her satisfaction.