State College Amends Responsible Contractor Ordinance After Struggling to Get Qualified Bidders

Borough Council on Monday approved amendments to the State College’s Responsible Contractor Ordinance after failing to get bidders who met its requirements on nearly every project it applied to since it went into effect in 2025.

Council voted 4-2 in favor of changes to the cost value and types of projects that trigger the ordinance conditions, as well as provisions for workforce training requirements. John Hayes, Nalini Krishnankutty, Evan Myers and Susan Venegoni voted yes, while Matt Herndon and Kevin Kassab voted no. Gopal Balachandran was absent.

The Responsible Contractor Ordinance as approved by council in October 2024 included requirements related to safety training and prevailing wage payments, as well as that 70% of the craft labor workforce on public works projects over $250,000 be journeypersons who have completed a state- or federally-approved apprenticeship training program or registered apprentices currently enrolled in such a program.

Amendments approved on Monday now apply the RCO only to public works building and facilities projects valued at $500,000 or more — doubling the value threshold and reducing the types of projects included. It no longer applies to most road maintenance paving jobs, culvert maintenance and repair, water line and roadway drainage work.

The changes also address what borough officials said has been the biggest hurdle: the requirement that 70% of craft labor on RCO projects be journeypersons or registered apprentices. The amendments allow an exemption from that requirement if a contractor meets one of three conditions:

• An Experienced Modified Rate of 1.0 or less. The EMR is a calculation “used by insurance firms to price the cost of workers’ compensation premiums and is recognized as an industry standard for safety,” according to the amended ordinance.

• A majority of workers on job site demonstrate sufficient training or continuing education in worker classification. That includes completion or participation in a Class A
registered apprenticeship program; completion of a relevant postsecondary education degree or certificate; completion of relevant curriculum from the National Center for Construction
Education & Research; or evidence of more than 10 years of relevant job experience.

• Evidence of successful completion of a relevant public works project in the borough.

Borough Council suspended the RCO from August through December 2025 to allow for timely bidding of phase two of the Calder Way project and annual street repaving after staff had to request approval for exemptions in re-bidding on previous projects that met the threshold and received no qualified bidders. The temporary suspension was also enacted to allow time for amendments addressing the issues to be drafted.

The borough had only one project since the RCO took effect that received a qualified bidder, for parking garage repairs, Borough Manager Tom Fountaine said. All others for which the RCO applied had none, and road projects in particular were an issue.

Bidding a project then going to council to ask for exemptions from the ordinance in re-bidding also posed a problem.

“At this point the challenge that we reach is we aren’t receiving as many bids as we used to, perhaps, and then secondly, contractors that are bidding are exposing their bid numbers,” Fountaine said. “Then we’re having to reject the bids because they’re not qualified and the project has to go back out, which creates an unfair bidding environment.”

While opponents of RCOs in State College and elsewhere have said they unfairly favor union shops with apprentice programs and can box out otherwise qualified contractors, Borough Council members have said it is about ensuring proper safety training and worker protections.

Though Fountaine noted during a discussion of the amendments earlier in July that the borough has not had any serious accidents on its projects in decades, Myers said on Monday that the RCO was developed in part because of cases like the death of a construction worker on a private construction project on Pugh Street in 2022.

“We need projects to get done for our community,” Myers said. “To prevent them from getting done is a problem, but we also need to protect the folks that do the work. Those should not be mutually exclusive, and I am not suggesting that every contractor makes them mutually exclusive. But by ordinance, we are requiring that this happen. I am torn in how to vote for this once again, because I am concerned about the message that we are sending.”

Jim Willshier, director of government affairs for the Associated Builders and Contractors Keystone Chapter, which supports merit shops and awarding contracts regardless of union affiliation, said that the apprenticeship requirements and other language in RCOs like State College’s original version “bar a lot of contractors from being able to bid because they don’t qualify, even though they’ve had past success.”

He added that the amendments address the council’s safety concerns.

“The EMR language in particular would make sure that contractors that have had high safety records, which is objective data provided by insurance companies based on injuries and fatalities,” Willshier said. “A high safety record with EMR would make sure that you have safe and responsible contractors bidding on projects and being eligible to be awarded them by the borough.”

Voting against the changes, Herndon suggested that before amending the ordinance, borough staff should collect information about what contractors are interacting with the bid process, what types of questions they ask and whether they ultimately submit a bid.

“If it comes back and it says everyone who interacted with our bidding process, none of them qualified under the RCO, no matter what, literally no one is interacting with this process that qualifies, that’s a real data point that makes me very comfortable moving forward with this,” Herndon said. “If that’s not the data point we have, then I want to move differently.”

Kassab also made a failed motion to table the amendments “until more information verifies why bids are not being submitted.”

Hayes, though, said the ordinance was a “good-faith” effort that “clearly is not working” as it was originally written.

“I’m … voting for this, to give it a try, and we’ll come back in a year. and if it’s still not working, then we’ll amend it again and take a really empirical approach to this to get where we want to be that balances the needs of multiple stakeholders of getting things built rapidly in our community, while also protecting the workers that are doing that work,” Hayes said. “And so I think we can find our path forward here. But I think this is a good approach to try and improve something we tried last year that didn’t work.”