Groups worry natural restoration efforts will slow on Minnesota lands because of new wage law

Workers planting trees and removing buckthorn under state-funded natural restoration projects will get a substantial pay hike — from about $18 an hour to more than $40 in some cases — under new language in Minnesota’s prevailing wage law. Nonprofit leaders managing the projects worry the change will diminish the amount of work that gets done across the state.

A handful of the nonprofits sought clarification last week in a meeting with Commissioner Nicole Blissenbach of the Department of Labor and Industry. She confirmed for them that the jobs, including other tasks such as chainsawing, tractor work and herbicide treatment, must now be paid at rates already established for comparable construction work whenever the work is funded in whole or part by state funds. There could be rare exceptions, she told them, but prevailing wages are hard-wired to the type of work laborers perform, not the purpose of the work.

“Are you digging a hole? Are you using a chain saw? Are you driving a skid-steer?” Blissenbach said in an interview after the meeting. “We’re helping the stakeholders to understand which classifications apply to that work.”

Similar concerns were raised in the past by nonprofit managers of state-funded affordable housing projects. By following prevailing wage laws, those project managers got less bang for the buck on stated-funded housing starts.

“It’s important to do the work and it’s also important to make sure people get paid for the value of work they are performing,” Blissenbach said.

She said it was her agency that sought the change to the prevailing wage statute. The 2024 Legislature approved the addition of the words “restoration,” “land,” and “any work suitable for and intended for use by the public, or for the public benefit.” The new words describe what types of projects are subject to an existing scale of prevailing wages for building construction and road work.

It means wildlife habitat projects, trail building, invasive species removal and other restoration endeavors funded by state grants to conservation groups will cost more than the groups are accustomed to paying. One example expressed to Blissenbach is that basic forest and conservation work in Cook County costs less than $18 an hour. Under the prevailing wage law, those same workers will now get paid $40.26 an hour.

The cheaper of those two rates “is much more in-line with market rates for conservation work,” Blissenbach was told in a letter of concern from David Hartwell, chair of the Lessard-Sams Outdoor Heritage Council.

Hartwell said he sought last week’s 90-minute meeting with Blissenbach after conservation groups started asking the council to clarify the law change. The Outdoor Heritage Council is at the forefront of natural resource grants totaling more than $150 million a year. The funds stem from the state’s voter-approved Legacy Amendment that raised the state sales tax by three-eighths of one percent. The state’s Clean Water Fund and the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund also work with conservation partners concerned about incorporating prevailing wage law rates into their projects.

Hartwell wrote in his letter to Blissenbach: “We are respectfully requesting a process by which to establish appropriate rates for restoration-based work.”

He added, “Utilizing highway and heavy construction wage determinations for all conservation projects is not appropriate.”

Last Tuesday’s meeting at the Department of Labor and Industry was attended by 19 people, including Natural Resources Commissioner Sarah Strommen and representatives from Audubon Society, Minnesota Land Trust, Great River Greening, the Nature Conservancy, Trust for Public Land, the American Bird Conservancy and the state Board of Water and Soil Resources.

Mark Johnson, executive director of the Outdoor Heritage Council, said the law change delivered a shock to the system and that Tuesday’s meeting helped resolve misunderstandings. The conservation groups are getting together to consider state codes for restoration jobs as deadlines approach for projects early next year.

He said project managers want to do the right thing for workers, but they also want the best return on the investment of public dollars. Blissenbach said her staff stands ready to help project managers mesh existing wage standards to the different types of work they assign in the field.

But the commissioner stressed that it’s not a matter of coming up with new job descriptions that deserve their own prevailing wage codes.

“It’s just really drilling down to the work. … We will help them do that,” the commissioner said.

Kevin Pranis of the Laborers’ International Union of North America didn’t attend the meeting with Blissenbach. He said her agency was right to call on the Legislature to pull state-funded restoration work into the parameters of prevailing wage law. Millions of dollars a year go into the projects for the benefit of the environment and public recreation, and workers deserve equal pay to those working at state-funded construction sites.

Pranis said “your back hurts the same” whether you’re laboring on the edges of a trunk highway or in the woods. His office previously heard from laborers who received less than half as much money for restoration field work than they did for the same type of work at state-funded construction sites.

“If you are doing public works with state funding, all of that is covered by the prevailing wage law,” Pranis said. “The threshold is quite high to say, ‘This is actually a new job and it deserves its own [labor] code.’ "

Pranis said various non-profits that manage labor costs on state-funded public works projects have complained in the past that they work with very small contractors who can’t handle the red tape involved in complying with the prevailing wage law. But over and over, the small firms figure it out, he said. Many of them use readily available computer tools.

“The idea that there are happy workers getting paid 20 bucks an hour pulling buckthorn, with no health care and no benefits … I’d say that’s inaccurate,” Pranis said.

If field workers are performing the same tasks as trunk highway workers, they should get paid the same, he said.

It’s unclear how conservation groups might continue to expand their projects with federal partners, who aren’t accustomed to paying higher state-regulated wages.