EDITORIAL: Clark County Commission delays Strip safety improvement

Prevailing wage laws are a bane to common sense, increasing the costs of public works projects at the expense of taxpayers so liberal politicians can suck up to organized labor.

And now such statutes have gotten in the way of a high-priority local public safety undertaking.

The Clark County Commission on Tuesday put off approving a $2.5 million appropriation to install 500 steel posts on the Strip between Tropicana Avenue and Spring Mountain Road. The project is part of an ongoing set of safety improvements implemented in response to a 2015 incident in which a woman intentionally drove her vehicle onto a crowded Strip sidewalk, killing one pedestrian and injuring 34 others.

But those improvements are now on hold because of a petty dispute involving a contractor and union activists.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Lou DeSalvio of Nevada for Fair Contracting accused the construction company doing the bollard work of shortchanging three concrete finishers. Mr. DeSalvio told the commissioners that the men had been performing tasks outside of their labor classification but were paid the lower prevailing wage assigned to concrete finishers. “They basically got cheated,” he said, “who knows how many hundreds of dollars.”

In response, the seven commissioners — all of them Democrats and all of them wholly unprepared to upset their patrons in organized labor — put off approving any new work on the Strip project for at least two weeks. All over a disagreement that belongs in small claims court involving “many hundreds of dollars.”

This is patently ridiculous, and there was no need for any delay. When the commissioners convene on Jan. 16, they should dig down deep and find the backbone to put the safety of Strip pedestrians over appeasing their union friends. After all, they do work for the taxpayers, don’t they?