President Donald Trump is a builder, and his plan to redevelop New York’s dilapidated Penn Station will leave a great mark on the city.
Unfortunately, the price tag is estimated at $6 billion to $7 billion, which is a lot.
Yet he can significantly curb the figure by leading the fight to waive a 141-year-old New York law that needlessly inflates costs.
A recent study by the Building Trades Employers Association, a group of unionized city contractors, found that Penn Station costs could be trimmed by as much as $560 million if the feds waived that archaic law, known as the Scaffold Law, at least on federally funded projects.
Notably, the law has nothing to do with scaffolding; it simply creates a legal standard that holds property owners and contractors strictly liable for any injuries sustained on a construction site — even if the worker is 99% responsible for his injuries.
The other 49 states all use a legal standard known as comparative negligence, which assesses fault based actions of the parties.
The result? Insurance costs are as much as 500% higher in New York than in other states.
Across the nation, insurance generally consumes 2% to 4% of construction value; in New York the comparable figure is 8% to 10%.
That cost difference is yet another reason why New York has made itself too expensive to build anything.
It also means construction costs are inflated by 6% to 10% solely because of the Scaffold Law.
This impacts every building project in the state.
A few years ago, the general counsel to the NYS School Construction Authority estimated that if the Scaffold Law were repealed, the city could build two or three entirely new schools every year.
And while builders must have insurance to operate, many insurers have fled the state because of this law, reducing competition and raising costs even higher.
All this is largely hidden from public view, so nothing happens. Repeated efforts to reform the system over 40 years have failed in Albany.
Now Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-NY) has proposed federal legislation to waive the Scaffold Law on projects funded by Washington.
Our coalition estimates that on highway and transit projects over the next five years, costs will fall by up to $2.3 billion.
Over the next 10 years, we believe unnecessary federal costs could drop by as much as $10 billion.
The Scaffold Law has its defenders. Trial lawyers and unions contend it makes workers safer, but the evidence belies this assertion.
Data from all 50 states show that rates of injuries and fatalities on construction sites in New York are actually worse, not better, than in many other states — including neighboring New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Once upon a time, many states had laws like New York’s.
Yet with the advent of federal and state safety standards, every one of them has reformed its laws, the last being Illinois, which repealed its absolute liability standard in 1995.
Yet, 31 years after that, New York hasn’t fixed its law — thanks to special-interest lobbying in Albany from plaintiff lawyers and trade unions.
The law has also created a cottage injury of staged construction accident fraud, orchestrated by corrupt lawyers and medical providers.
Lowering construction costs (which, by the way, ultimately get passed on to the public) won’t just improve affordability; it’ll also create more construction projects and jobs.
Unlike other states, New York continues to lose construction jobs. Today, we have fewer construction jobs than prior to the pandemic.
Union leaders have their heads in the sand and refuse to confront the reality that their defense of the Scaffold Law means fewer jobs for their workers.
Only President Trump, it seems, can make a dent in this nonsense.
He wants to rebuild Penn Station, and we know he hates to pay more for something than it’s worth.
He could save billions of federal dollars on Penn Station, the Second Avenue subway, the Port Authority Bus Terminal and upgrades at the New York City Housing Authority if he leads the effort to scrap the Scaffold Law.
In the 1980s, Trump took on repairs at the Wollman Ice Rink after the City had failed to get the job done over several years.
Penn Station creates yet another opportunity for him to fix a longstanding problem in New York — and help Make New York Buildable Again.
John Faso, a former New York state legislator and congressman, chairs the Build More New York coalition.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
