How Beshear can help the schools

Area school superintendents were meeting today to discuss the impact of budget cuts that Gov. Steve Beshear wants to make in school funding to deal with a looming budget crisis.

If I were a school superintendent, I'd be telling Beshear that if he really wants to help school districts and taxpayers, he can go to labor leaders and say the time to take one for the team -- the Kentucky team -- is now. Let's get rid of prevailing wage laws, or at least try some logical pilot projects as experiments. The savings on construction projects across the state would quickly move into multi-millions.

The cuts that Beshear wants and very well may need are potentially devastating to local school districts and our post-secondary institutions such as Northern Kentucky University and Gateway -- not to mention every thing else that state government funds.

No Republican can get this done. It will take a Democratic governor with crediblity with organized labor and a Democrat-controlled state House to move an issue that seems immovable.

Other states have successfully experimented with removing prevailing wage requirements from school construction projects. Savings of around 15 percent are predicted. Why not find out if that's true here?

And all anyone is talking about is paying market-rate wages, not minimum wages or artificially inflated ones. Every other standard of quality and performance remains the same.

When our editorial board recently interviewed Democrat Dan Wolff for the state House seat being vacated by Jon Draud, I was quite disappointed to find Wolff immovable on this subject. (Wolff lost Tuesday to Republican Alecia Webb-Edgington in a special election.) I just don't see how anyone can say they want to be good stewards of the public's money if they aren't willing to consider alternatives -- even sacred-cow subjects to Democrats such as prevailing wage.