Our view: PLA decision was best option for city

The Cloquet City Council and Mayor Roger Maki did the right thing last week when they voted to eliminate the project labor agreement mandate for private businesses.

We elect the mayor and the councilors to look after the city of Cloquet, and that should be their top priority. If the private PLA mandate is discouraging investment in businesses or housing here, that’s not good for Cloquet.

The fact that zero developers have signed a private PLA since it was mandated in 2017 is proof that the requirement was, indeed, limiting development here.

Zero PLAs means zero companies working with the Duluth Building and Construction Trades Council. They have not provided a single union worker through a private PLA in Cloquet, ever.

You can’t get worse than zero jobs.

Kudos to the councilors who realized that city staff and the Cloquet Economic Development Authority had actually come up with a compromise, by recommending the private mandate be quashed but replaced with an incentive, that would offer companies an additional 15 percent in city low-interest loans or tax increment financing if they sign a private PLA.

Unions are important, but it’s not the city’s job to force private companies to employ union members from Duluth and Hermantown and Superior just because they’re part of the regional building trades council that is written into the PLA, potentially leaving out Cloquet residents who aren’t in a union or who belong to a different union organization.

And shame on the unions not compromising, rather using the same trope as groups that argue about abortion and gun control — that they can’t give an inch. Yes, they can. Use some good old common sense and political skills and meet in the middle.

City council and mayor races are non-partisan, with good reason. We aren’t electing people because of their political philosophies. To see how well that works, just look at Congress or the Minnesota State Legislature last year.

We are not saying all PLAs are bad and neither is the city. The vote last week did not eliminate project labor agreements here. The public mandate remains. City projects with costs totaling more than $175,000 must still use PLAs, like they have almost two dozen times since 2017.

Additionally, just because a company doesn’t sign a PLA doesn’t mean they won’t hire union or pay prevailing wages to non-union employees. Just look at Sappi. They hire more than 95 percent union workers, but won’t sign a PLA because it complicates the project and takes away control with myriad additional requirements such as the percentage of journeymen working there.

Of course, eliminating the private PLA mandate also doesn’t guarantee any private companies will suddenly invest in housing or new/existing businesses and take greater advantage of some of the economic development tools the city has to offer.

But pre-2017 gap financing deals suggest they would, with examples including a $250,000 loan to Community Memorial Hospital, tax increment financing of $445,000 for construction of Oakwood Apartments and $500,000 in assistance to Daqota Systems in 2010 to build at the Cloquet Business Park.

That was financial assistance that greased the wheels of development, and we could use more of that. After all, there’s a lot more space at that business park … a person has to wonder if Essentia Health even considered the Cloquet business park or decided they didn’t want to jump through all the extra hoops that a PLA adds to any incentives from the city.

There are a number of potential projects or vacant properties ripe for development. Let’s let the businesses and developers know we are open for business, and we are not going to complicate their lives and their risk levels anymore than any other city.