GILROY
– Labor union attorneys have filed a 200-page environmental
protest against Gilroy’s largest housing development that critics
are calling a thinly veiled attempt to get jobs for union workers
and a misuse of California’s environmental laws.
Union lawyers say Gilroy would violate the state’s sacred
environmental laws if its Council approves a 1,400-home residential
development as is, opening the cash-strapped city and the Glen Loma
Group development firm up to a lawsuit.
GILROY – Labor union attorneys have filed a 200-page environmental protest against Gilroy’s largest housing development that critics are calling a thinly veiled attempt to get jobs for union workers and a misuse of California’s environmental laws.
Union lawyers say Gilroy would violate the state’s sacred environmental laws if its Council approves a 1,400-home residential development as is, opening the cash-strapped city and the Glen Loma Group development firm up to a lawsuit.
The San Francisco-based attorneys have already tried using that prospect to lure the project’s developer into a binding labor agreement that would guarantee the general contractor would hire only union workers when homes within the Glen Loma Ranch development get built starting in 2004.
In what appears to be the first union shot fired across the bow of the city, the city’s favorite environmental consultant and Gilroy’s highest-profile housing developer, lawyers representing electrical and sheetmetal unions filed 200 pages worth of environmental concerns at City Hall last week. Unions used four separate environmental consulting firms to poke holes at the project’s environmental impact report. The comments produce a document thicker than the environmental review it blasts.
“This is a vehicle to tie up projects and that’s all it is,” said Jim Severson, the lawyer for Glen Loma Group developer John Filice.
But if the document – which was filed after Filice refused to sign the labor agreement – packs enough legal muster, then the environmental review process for the west side development could be delayed by weeks or months. Or, the entire project could get tied up in the courts even longer.
To sign or not to sign
Filice said his company is “shocked” and “outraged” by the approach of the unions, whose workers he said have almost always been used to build Glen Loma Group projects in the past. Glen Loma Group built the Gilroy Outlets and the ritzy Eagle Ridge development, among other high profile projects.
“If the unions delay this project because of environmental concerns, it will be union workers that will suffer because the project was going to get built with union labor anyway. That’s the tragedy,” Filice said.
“We’ve had a good relationship with unions, so why the heavy-handed approach? This is like your good friend all of the sudden one day saying, ‘I don’t trust you.’ ”
Filice won’t sign off on the labor deal for a variety of reasons, including the longevity of the project. Some phases of the development will start construction in 2004, others won’t begin until 2016.
“I’d be crazy to guarantee something seven or eight years down the road when I don’t know what the business climate will be then,” Filice said.
Union lawyers Daniel Cardozo and Tanya Gulesserian, from the San Francisco-based law firm Adams, Broadwell, Joseph & Cardozo, declined to comment for this article.
In a Dispatch article last month, which ran after the union had requested a 30-day extension of the project’s environmental review period, Cardozo was asked if the unions were blackmailing Glen Loma Ranch with the threat of prolonged environmental battles if union workers were not used.
Cardozo called those claims “outrageous,” and said, “We’ve always been interested in ensuring that major development projects that are approved are the most responsible projects possible.”
Last month, Cardozo called environmentally unfriendly projects a “triple whammy” for union workers. The “whammies” are the potential loss of jobs for union workers to nonunion and out-of-state labor, the consumption of housing permits in this controlled-growth area resulting in less opportunities for work in Gilroy, and finally, union workers have to suffer through the traffic impacts, overcrowded schools and bad air caused by poorly planned projects.
In an e-mail sent Wednesday, Cardozo did not comment further, but attached a letter to the editor written by Gilroy resident and sheetmetal union member William Culbertson. In a follow-up phone call Cardozo did not answer whether the letter – which echoed Cardozo’s points – was written by Culbertson or penned by union lawyers and sent in Culbertson’s name.
Since the letters were sent via e-mail on both occasions, Culbertson never signed his name to the letter. Culbertson declined several opportunities to comment for this story.
Culbertson and fellow sheetmetal union member Kenneth Fong are mentioned in the 200-page environmental document as residents “who share the concerns” of the unions. Fong could not be reached for comment.
Breaking antitrust laws?
Because his own lawyer says the union deal is an antitrust violation, Filice said the Glen Loma Group will not sign the labor agreement. However, Filice’s lawyer, Jim Severson, says Glen Loma Group’s battle with the union is far from over.
Severson, of San Francisco-based Bingham McCuthchen LLP, says the unions would not violate antitrust laws if they get the Glen Loma Ranch contractor to sign the labor agreement, which typically forces the contractor to pay roughly $30 an hour to unions in lost labor charges when union labor isn’t used.
Antitrust laws do not prohibit the contractor from entering a labor agreement with the developer. So, in a market where there are few contractors willing to buy a developer’s land, or in a market where all the contractors are union-friendly, a developer can still be forced to hire all union labor.
Severson says the local sheetmetal and electrical unions are following a modus operandi that has existed since the 1980s. The process works like this:
First, the city hires environmental consultants to do an environmental impact report. Next, when the first draft of that document is available for public review, union lawyers hire their own experts to study the environmental impacts and they find as many shortcomings as possible in that document. Before the union’s environmental review is filed with the city, union lawyers contact the developers and ask them to sign the labor agreement.
If they sign it, the environmental concerns go away. If they don’t, they get filed with the city and the drawn-out process of responding to the concerns begins.
Severson said, in general, if the political climate is right, an environmentally friendly City Council may deny approval of the project until the environmental impacts are worked out. With a more developer-friendly Council, approval of the project can result in a lawsuit by the unions.
However, Severson said the most common result in his experience with roughly 20 of these cases, developers sign onto some form of labor deal that is a compromise with union demands.
Reviewing the EIR
The environmental impact report already is costing Glen Loma Ranch more than $118,000, a cost that initially gets paid for by the developer, but ultimately is passed on to home buyers. The city’s environmental consulting firm, EMC Planning Group, is using this week to review the union comments.
It is not yet clear if the City Council review scheduled for Feb. 9 will have to be delayed. It is also unknown if the additional review will change the $118,000 price tag.
In their review of the environmental impact report, union experts criticize EMC’s work on a variety of levels from traffic impact analysis to information on groundwater availability. They say the city should not be recommending approval of the impact report.
“The city’s proposed approvals do not comply with the requirements of (the California Environmental Quality Act). The city may not approve the project or grant any permits for the project until an adequate (draft environmental impact report) is prepared and re-circulated for public review and comment.”
Planning Division Manager Bill Faus said the city is taking the unions’ comments seriously, but described the demand for a new impact report as “boilerplate language.”
The city and its consultant have received other comments from environmental agencies regarding the Glen Loma Ranch project. None of those exceed three pages, EMC consultant Teri Wissler Adam said.
“We haven’t seen anything like this before,” Wissler Adam said. “This is our first time dealing with a union group.”
EMC Planning Group has been in business for 25 years.
