On September 10, three members of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly introduced an ordinance that seeks to change who is allowed to build borough schools, roads, and public buildings. It drew little notice, but deserves more – and not only in Fairbanks.

Ordinance 2026-25 would amend Title 16 of the borough code to require that every borough construction project estimated above $3.5 million be referred to a five-member review team before the project goes out to bid. That team decides whether a community workforce agreement (project labor agreement by another name) is attached to the solicitation. Where one is attached, every contractor and every subcontractor at every tier must become signatory to it, and remain signatory for the duration of the project, as a condition of performing any work.

The ordinance also declares, in plain language, that it is borough public policy to use these agreements to the fullest extent allowed by law.

THIS IS ABOUT PROCUREMENT, NOT WAGES

Proponents of these measures usually argue based on worker pay. In Alaska, that argument has a problem: the pay is already set.

Alaska’s Little Davis-Bacon Act requires prevailing wages and fringe benefits on public construction contracts over $25,000 awarded by the state or any political subdivision. Where a contractor does not provide fringe benefits, the full value must be paid to the worker in cash. Every borough project captured by Ordinance 2026-25 is more than a hundred times above that threshold. Scale is already being paid. Fringes are already being paid.

What a community workforce agreement adds is not money in a worker’s pocket. It is exclusivity of channel — signatory status, hiring hall dispatch, and benefit contributions routed into multiemployer trusts. For an open-shop firm that already funds its own benefit plan and cannot suspend it for one job, signatory status generally means paying twice, with the second payment going into trusts where short-duration project employees will never vest.

That duplicated money does not reach a single worker. It is pure cost, and it is borne by the taxpayer through the bid.

FEWER BIDDERS MEANS HIGHER COST TO TAXPAYERS

There is no serious dispute about what happens to public construction prices when the field of bidders narrows. In competitive bidding, the margin the winner collects above cost falls as the number of real bidders rises, and it falls fastest at the low end of that count. Moving from six bidders to three does not shave the premium the public pays. It roughly doubles it.

So, the question that should govern this debate is narrow and entirely answerable: on Fairbanks borough construction lettings above $3.5 million over the past five years, how many contractors bid, and how many of them were non-signatory?

The borough holds those bid tabulations. They have not been published. No fiscal note accompanies the ordinance. Nobody has told the Assembly, or the public, what this will cost.

The provision that ought to trouble anyone who cares about how public money is administered, regardless of their view on organized labor.

THE TABLE IS PRESET

The review team has five seats. Three are members of the current administration — the chief of staff, the public works director as chair, and a representative of the department sponsoring the project. One belongs to the Fairbanks Building and Construction Trades Council. The fifth is a contractor representative, selected by mutual consent of three trade associations.

Associated Builders and Contractors, the merit-shop association whose member firms are precisely the ones a signatory requirement excludes, holds no seat and no voice in filling one. The decision proceeds by simple majority. Also, there is no representative from the Assembly.

Then there is the provision that ought to trouble anyone who cares about how public money is administered, regardless of their view on organized labor. The parties to the community workforce agreement are the awarded contractor and the trades council. The borough is not a party. Once imposed, the agreement may be revised only by mutual written agreement of those two. Grievances and arbitration run between the contractor and the labor organizations.

The borough mandates the instrument. The borough pays for it. The borough then has no seat at the table where it is enforced or amended, beyond a single representative on an oversight committee that reports on hiring statistics and says nothing about cost.

A STATEWIDE PATTERN

The ordinance cites Anchorage and Juneau as precedent, and that citation is the reason this matters outside the Interior. Juneau and Anchorage are first-class boroughs that have a combined city and borough government. Fairbanks is a second-class general law borough with two distinct cities in its boundaries: North Pole and Fairbanks. Second-class boroughs have very limited authority.

Anchorage adopted its own ordinance in 2018 at the identical $3.5 million threshold. The municipality then had to pass a second ordinance suspending its own effective date, pushing it into April 2019, because the template agreement had not yet been drafted. Fairbanks is now being asked to adopt the same threshold with the same document still unwritten. The ordinance refers to a “master CWA” the chief of staff would hand to procurement. No one outside the building has read it. In the name of transparency, the document should be available for all to see.

Anchorage has roughly seven construction seasons of experience under this policy. Bidder counts and unit costs exist. If that precedent supports the Fairbanks measure, the sponsors should produce the numbers. Assertion is not evidence, and municipalities borrowing policy from one another without borrowing the results is how bad ideas travel.

What should not happen is adoption first and justification afterward.

Another problem with borrowing the number is that Anchorage set its threshold at $3.5 million in 2018. Consumer prices have risen roughly a third since then, and construction costs have grown further still. Adopting the identical nominal figure in 2026 means adopting a threshold about a quarter lower in real terms than the one Anchorage wrote – the equivalent of roughly $2.6 million in 2018 dollars. The same number reaches a materially larger share of the borough’s construction program than it did eight years ago.

That gap will keep widening, because the figure is fixed in the code with no adjustment for inflation. Every year construction costs rise, the threshold captures more projects, and the Assembly that adopted it will have made that decision without ever voting on it. Alaska bid costs outran the national indices through 2021 and 2022, which means the drift here runs faster than the national arithmetic suggests.

DUBIOUS TIMING

The borough election is October 6. Ordinance 2026-25 takes effect at 5 p.m. on the 19th day after adoption — well after a new Assembly is seated.

A permanent restructuring of how the borough buys construction, adopted by an outgoing body, effective on the watch of an incoming one, with no fiscal note, no published agreement, and no bid data on the record, is not a close call on process. It does not matter which way one leans on the underlying policy.

VOTE IT DOWN

This ordinance should be defeated.

If the sponsors believe the case is there, nothing stops them from bringing it back with a fiscal note, a published master agreement, the borough’s own bid tabulations, and a written opinion from the borough attorney on whether a blanket policy of using these agreements to the fullest extent allowed by law weakens the borough’s legal footing, which rests on case-by-case proprietary judgment rather than standing preference. It will give the cities of Fairbanks and North Pole to evaluate the impact of the procurement code on their own code.

What should not happen is adoption first and justification afterward. A permanent change to how the borough buys construction, built on a threshold borrowed from another municipality and eroded by eight years of inflation, imposing an agreement the borough will neither sign nor be able to enforce, on a bidding pool nobody has bothered to measure, is not a policy decision. It is a guess with a taxpayer backstop.

Vote no. If it is worth doing, it will still be worth doing in November, with the numbers in hand.

Written comment goes to Assembly@fnsb.gov. The next Fairbanks Assembly meeting is scheduled for Sept. 24 at 6 p.m. Anyone who wishes to testify can sign up with the borough clerk at 907-459-1401 by 4:30 p.m. on the day of the hearing.

The views expressed here are those of the author.

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