Water Quality Financing Act of 2007

WATER QUALITY FINANCING ACT OF 2007

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Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Louisiana for yielding, and for his leadership and his hard and diligent work in committee.

I also compliment the chairman from Minnesota who has a gracious approach to this and generally a reasonable approach to this issue. But this Davis-Bacon issue is something where I meet a philosophical divide. I don't know if there is another Member of this Congress who has live lived under Davis-Bacon, earned Davis-Bacon wages and paid Davis-Bacon wages, but I can tell you I am one who has done both. And it goes back through 28 years of the construction business; 1,400 and some consecutive weeks of tracking wages and paying the thing called ``prevailing wage' and knowing prevailing wage is not prevailing wage. It is always union scale. And the reason for that is because no one reports the prevailing wage for fear they will be organized to be become a union and they will have to pay a union scale.

I have difficulty with this because I hire my people year round. We make sure that they get a good living wage for the full year. We provide health insurance. We provide retirement benefits. And when you pay people a union scale, then you can only plug them on a machine for the hours of running that machine. You can't afford to have them grease it or haul it or fix it.

So I know employers that will work 16 hours a day in order to keep the machines supported so their union scale man can climb in the seat of it. This is a distortion of the free enterprise system.

I will argue also that this bill has an earmark in it, and this earmark is the mark called Davis-Bacon wages. Now, earmarks go back to when a pig is born you notch his ear so you can track his genetics through the marketing system. Well, this is an earmark into the first generation of money that goes into the revolving fund. Then once that money is in there, it comes back around again and again with a Davis-Bacon earmark in it, and I know Midwesterners really appreciate this argument, but the next generation of pigs, you at least got to earmark him when he is born.

This one automatically earmarks every generation of money that rolls through this revolving fund now until the end of perpetuity, and that, Madam Chairman, is a bridge too far. We are not just labeling this Davis-Bacon wage scale. It is Davis-Bacon wage scale in perpetuity.

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Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Louisiana for working so well together on this amendment.

Madam Chairman, really all this amendment does is it just stops the expansion of the Davis-Bacon, and it says we are not going to move this Davis-Bacon into a revolving fund. That is what the language that is in the underlying bill does, and this amendment simply strikes out the insertion that applies Davis-Bacon.

So what does that really mean is a question that Members need to evaluate when they are thinking about what kinds of services and what kind of work can we get done out there across America. I understand the intensity of the Louisianans here today. They have a lot at stake. That is why we brought this legislation.

In the $14 billion cumulative total that is part of this overall bill, I know, from hands-on experience being a contractor who has bid projects both ways, Davis-Bacon and merit shop, and my average number is a 20 percent increase; there are numbers out there higher and lower, but 20 percent, this bill wastes at least $2.8 billion. That could be projects. That could be projects that are going to help the people in this country.

That money is at least wasted, but then it goes into the revolving fund, and it pollutes the rest of those dollars that are in there. So if I do the calculation on this, we come up with a number, it will be about $280 billion over time; 20 percent of that is $56 billion. So we are not putting just $2.8 billion here into the waste bin; we are putting $56 billion perhaps into the waste bin, Madam Chair, and it keeps us from being able to get these taxpayers' resources into projects that can really help people, especially the people that so desperately need them.

I will tell you from my experience as a contractor who has worked and bid Davis-Bacon projects, I have gone into communities to bid these types of projects and had to do the bid according to the costs that are inflated into them, and had the community look at the overall bid, low bid. And I have been low bid, have had them reject my bid because it was too high; they couldn't afford it. They would pull the bid back, repackage the package without Davis-Bacon, and I could come in there cheaper, as did my competition, the community went without Federal dollars, as this inflated too much.

These communities went without Federal dollars because it was too expensive to use the Federal funding. That ought to tell us something. As they went back and they funded it out, they bonded it out themselves. They pulled it out of taxes. Sometimes they go back and raise private dollars because of the overall inflation that is imposed by this kind of policy. This is the one that goes in perpetuity.

You mark this revolving fund with this bill. And it isn't just these dollars, it is every single dollar that touches it from this day forward on into the future of the United States until some time comes that this Congress gets a grip, gets a hold of itself and decides we can't afford to be putting this on.

I would add also that as you have an employer and an employee, they agree what to work on. I listen to the gentleman, Mr. George Miller, say it will keep them from making enough money to pay their health care. No, it is the other way around. It keeps us from hiring employees in year-round jobs where we provide, as the employer, the health care and retirement benefits because we can only afford to use them under these scales just for the job they have. It is inflationary. It is inefficient.

I would ask for a ``yes' vote on the Baker-King amendment.

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