The owner of a State College-based mechanical contractor began serving a jail sentence this week, two years after he pleaded guilty to charges that his company underpaid workers’ wages and benefits for prevailing-wage jobs over five years.
Scott C. Good, the founder and owner of Goodco Mechanical, reported to Clearfield County jail on Monday after state Superior Court in February upheld his conviction and sentence of four months to two years in jail.
Good’s attorneys informed the court at the time that he did not intend to file any further appeal. Prosecutors from the state attorney general’s office subsequently filed a motion to revoke Good’s bail and order him to report to prison.
“While this is not the outcome Mr. Good had hoped for, he is prepared to put this behind him,” defense attorney James Clancy said. “He looks forward to returning to his family and his employees. We sincerely thank the community and Mr. Good’s friends for their continued support.”
Good and GoodCo were initially charged in 2019 with more than 200 counts following a 21-month grand jury investigation prompted by allegations that they violated the state’s prevailing wage law by paying skilled trade workers at a lower rate than required on a $16 million PennDOT project in Clearfield County and public projects in other counties.
Most of the charges were dropped as part of a plea agreement, and Good pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor counts of theft by failure to make required disposition of funds.
Good was accused of directing journeyman electricians and plumbers to record portions of their work hours as lower paid laborers. The company also was accused of crediting itself hourly vacation benefits employees did not use in order to reduce the amount it had to pay toward fringe benefits.
The Pennsylvania Prevailing Wage Act requires contractors on projects that receive state or federal funding to pay the same hourly wages and benefits based on region and job classification.
It was the first time prosecutors pursued criminal charges in a prevailing wage matter, which is usually handled through administrative procedures outlined by the Department of Labor and Industry. His attorneys said at the time of the sentencing that Good, who had no prior record and who paid $64,000 in restitution, should have been given probation.
Good appealed on multiple grounds, including that the court lacked jurisdiction over violations of the Prevailing Wage Act, that the act was unconstitutionally vague as a basis for criminal prosecution, that Clearfield County Judge Fredric J. Ammerman abused discretion and that the sentence was the result of bias. At sentencing, Ammerman called white collar crime one of his “pet peeves over many years of doing this, both as a prosecutor and as judge.”
A panel of Superior Court judges rejected those challenges in upholding the sentence. Ammerman, they wrote, did not issue a predetermined sentence based on the crime, but sentenced Good within the standard range despite suggesting the aggravated range might be appropriate.
