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CC - ACTION ITEM: (1) Approve a Community Workforce Agreement with the Los Angeles and Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council with Coverage Thresholds of $750,000 for Multi-trade Contracts and $150,000 for Prime Specialty Contracts; and (2) Other Direction to the City Manager as Deemed Appropriate.
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Meeting Date: October 13, 2026
Contact Person/Dept.: Roger Harris/City Manager’s Office
Phone Number: (310) 253-6000
Fiscal Impact: Yes [] No [] General Fund: Yes [] No []
Attachments: Yes [X] No []
Public Notification: (E-Mail) Meetings and Agendas - City Council (10/13/2026)
Department Approval: Adam Troy, Assistant City Manager (10/07/2026) _____________________________________________________________________
RECOMMENDATION
Staff recommends the City Council (1) approve a Community Workforce Agreement with the Los Angeles and Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council with coverage thresholds of $750,000 for multi-trade contracts and $150,000 for prime specialty contracts; and (2) provide other direction to the City Manager as deemed appropriate.
BACKGROUND
City staff has negotiated a Community Workforce Agreement (CWA), a form of Project Labor Agreement, with the Regional Building Trades Council. The Agreement sets the terms under which covered public construction work is performed. In January 2026 the City Council discussed the possibility of a project labor agreement and directed staff to prepare a draft project labor agreement with a $1,000,000 threshold. For the reasons discussed below, the Community Workforce Agreement that is being proposed by staff includes a $750,000 threshold for $750,000 for multi-trade contracts and $150,000 for prime specialty contracts.
Staff analyzed the ninety-five projects in the Fiscal Year 2026-27 capital program, which total $90,941,634. The analysis produced three findings that shape the recommendation. First, on the multi-trade side, a threshold of $750,000 and a threshold of $1,000,000 reach the identical set of projects, because no multi-trade project in the program falls between those two figures. Second, the figure that determines coverage is the specialty threshold, and setting it at $150,000 brings thirty-one additional specialty projects under the Agreement that a single $1,000,000 threshold would leave out. Third, the recommended thresholds are the same two figures the Culver City Unified School District already uses in its own Community Workforce Agreement with the same Trades Council, effective January 1, 2026, and they also match the current citywide agreement in Palmdale and sit within the range used across agencies in Los Angeles County.
Culver City is a full-service city of approximately 40,000 residents within Los Angeles County. Despite its size, the City carries a substantial capital program, $90,941,634 in the adopted Fiscal Year 2026-27 Capital Improvement Program, spanning affordable housing, streets, parks, storm drains, public facilities, and fleet. The scale of that program is the reason a coverage standard for construction labor is before the Council now rather than as an abstract policy question.
The Los Angeles and Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council represents the construction trades across both counties. Community Workforce Agreements and Project Labor Agreements are in place at numerous public agencies in the region, including in Culver City, where the Culver City Unified School District has an executed agreement with this same Trades Council effective January 1, 2026. The City of Los Angeles maintains a Public Works Project Labor Agreement. Los Angeles County executed a countywide Community Workforce Agreement in June 2023 for projects over $5,000,000. Long Beach adopted a citywide agreement in 2021 with thresholds of $750,000 for non-street work and $1,000,000 for street work. El Monte entered an agreement with the same Trades Council in 2024. Palmdale has held an agreement since 2018 and renewed it as a citywide Community Workforce Agreement in October 2025 with the same Trades Council the City is negotiating with. The current Palmdale agreement uses thresholds of $750,000 for multi-trade contracts and $150,000 for specialty contracts, the same figures staff recommends here. In San Diego County, the City of San Diego and National City both maintain citywide agreements. These are reference points. Each agency set its own thresholds to fit its own program, and they are not uniform.
DISCUSSION
What the Agreement is and what the threshold does:
A Community Workforce Agreement is a pre-negotiated master agreement that sets uniform terms for covered public construction projects. It is negotiated once, between the City and the Trades Council, and then applies to each covered project without renegotiation. The threshold is the dollar level that determines which projects are covered.
The threshold is a switch, not a payment. When a construction contract exceeds the applicable threshold, the contractor that wins the bid performs that project under the terms of the Agreement. When a contract is below the threshold, it proceeds as a standard contract. No money is paid to the Trades Council at any point, and the City does not write a check to the union. The City continues to award contracts through its normal competitive bidding process.
On a covered project, the winning contractor must agree to terms that typically include the following:
• Hiring covered craft workers through the Trades Council dispatch system, with an allowance for the contractor to bring a specified number of its own core crew members.
• Paying prevailing wages, which are already required on public works projects in California under state law regardless of any agreement.
• Making contributions to the trade benefit trust funds on behalf of the workers on that project. These contributions are wages and benefits earned by the workers, not a payment to the union.
• Operating under a no strike, no lockout commitment for the duration of the project, with a defined dispute resolution process, which reduces the risk of a work stoppage delaying a City project.
A contractor does not need to be a union shop to bid or to work on a covered project. Section 2.6.1 gives the City the absolute right to award contracts to any contractor regardless of whether that contractor has an agreement with any union, provided the contractor is ready, willing and able to comply with the Agreement on that project. Section 3.11 provides that employees are not required to become or remain union members as a condition of performing covered work.
Community Workforce Agreement compared to Project Labor Agreement
In practice, at the agency level, Project Labor Agreement and Community Workforce Agreement describe the same instrument, and California agencies and the Trades Councils use the terms interchangeably. Los Angeles County, for example, refers to its Project Labor Agreement as a Community Workforce Agreement. Staff does not represent that one form carries labor terms the other lacks.
The distinction that matters is what the modern agreement includes and what the City chooses to call it. Staff recommends that the agreement take the Community Workforce Agreement form because the negotiated document pairs the standard labor terms with enforceable local and community workforce commitments that a simple Project Labor Agreement historically did not emphasize. Those commitments are the reason the recommendation is framed as a Community Workforce Agreement rather than only a Project Labor Agreement and are:
• Local and regional hiring targets, which direct a share of work hours to residents of the area and support local employment on City funded construction.
• Provisions supporting disadvantaged workers, veterans, and residents facing barriers to employment, so that public construction spending advances local workforce goals.
• Support for registered apprenticeships, which builds a pipeline of trained local workers and helps the region meet its future construction workforce needs.
The labor terms are common to both forms. The Community Workforce Agreement form adds the community and local hire commitments the Council has expressed interest in, and staff recommends it on that basis rather than on any claim that it is a technically different or stronger labor instrument.
Who the Agreement affects:
The following sets out who is affected by the Agreement and how.
The $750,000 and $1,000,000 thresholds reach the same work
Staff sorted the ninety-five capital projects by budget to determine what each candidate threshold would cover. On the multi-trade side, the finding is direct: no multi-trade project in the program falls between $750,000 and $1,000,000. A multi-trade threshold set at either figure therefore reaches the identical set of projects.
The seven projects covered at either figure are the same seven, listed here for the Council. These are the large building and infrastructure projects that involve multiple trades.
The practical conclusion is that the choice between $750,000 and $1,000,000 on the multi-trade side does not change which projects are covered. The existing January 2026 policy at $1,000,000 and the negotiated Agreement at $750,000 reach the same multi-trade projects. Moving to $750,000 changes nothing on that side of the program.
The specialty threshold is the decision with real effect
The figure that changes coverage is the specialty threshold. Specialty contracts, which involve a single trade or a single scope of work, are smaller by nature than multi-trade contracts. A single high threshold set to capture multi-trade work will rarely reach specialty work. Under the negotiated Agreement, specialty work is covered above $150,000. If the City relied only on a single $1,000,000 threshold, specialty work would be covered only where it exceeded $1,000,000.
Setting the specialty threshold at $150,000 brings thirty-one additional specialty projects under the Agreement that a single $1,000,000 threshold would leave outside it. These are the recurring public works projects that make up the everyday construction program, the storm drains, sewer repairs, resurfacing, court and pool work, sidewalk and traffic signal work. They are listed in full below so the Council can see exactly what the specialty
threshold reaches.
Total coverage under the recommended thresholds
The recommended thresholds of $750,000 for multi-trade work and $150,000 for specialty work bring forty-five of the ninety-five capital projects under the Agreement, totaling $52,933,644. A single $1,000,000 threshold with no specialty figure would cover fourteen projects, totaling $38,921,895.
The forty-seven projects that remain outside the Agreement under the recommended thresholds total $38,007,990. Of that amount, approximately $35,356,662 across thirty-six projects is not construction trade work at all. It consists of vehicle and equipment replacement, planning and engineering studies, public art, and similar items that any construction agreement would not reach. The construction trade work that remains below the thresholds is approximately $2,651,328 across eleven small projects. Measured against construction trade work alone, the recommended thresholds reach most of the
construction dollars in the program.
Coverage applies to contracts awarded after the Agreement takes effect
A Community Workforce Agreement governs contracts awarded after it is executed. It does not reach work already under contract. Because $33,225,409 of the capital program is carryover from prior years, a share of the projects that meet the dollar thresholds already have a construction contract in place. Staff reviewed the schedule and milestone record for each of the forty-five projects that meet the thresholds and sorted them on that basis.
Six projects totaling $16,178,866 are already under contract and are outside the Agreement regardless of the threshold the Council sets. They include the Washington Boulevard and Costco Stormwater Diversion Project at $6,608,323, which is sixty-seven percent complete, and the Ince Parking Structure Repairs, for which notice to proceed issued in November 2024.
Twenty-two projects totaling $21,097,641 have a Council contract award still ahead of them and would be reached by the Agreement. The nearest awards are scheduled for September 28, 2026.
The remaining seventeen projects, totaling $15,657,137, have not reached contract award in the capital record. Seven of them, totaling $9,473,152, carry either no prior year appropriation or no prior year expenditure, so no construction contract has been let and the Agreement would reach them on award. The other ten, totaling $6,183,985, are drawing against prior year appropriations and will be measured against the same test when each construction contract is awarded.
Exclusions in the current Agreement
The Agreement adds exclusions beginning at Section 2.5.
Section 2.5.10 excludes projects for the construction, rehabilitation, or preservation of affordable housing for extremely low, very low, and low to moderate income persons, and excludes Project Work funded through the California Department of Housing and Community Development under Community Development Block Grant funds. The exclusion is stated to be null and void if the City achieves a vehicle miles traveled exemption.
Section 2.5.13 applies where a federal, state, or local funding condition either bars the City from requiring bidders to enter a labor agreement or prohibits geographic based hiring preferences. The City is to use its best efforts to adapt the requirements of the Agreement into contract provisions that advance its purposes to the maximum extent feasible without conflicting with the funding terms, and to include those provisions in the public works contract for that project or portion of a project.
Applied to the capital program, Section 2.5.10 reaches one of the forty-five projects the recommended thresholds cover, the Ballona Creek Affordable Housing Project at $2,500,000. If that project is ultimately excluded, coverage falls to forty-four projects totaling $50,433,644. Twelve further projects totaling $15,475,140 are subject to the funding condition provision. Those projects remain under the Agreement, and the City works its requirements into each contract to the extent the funding allows.
Comparison to other agencies
The Culver City Unified School District has executed a Community Workforce Agreement with the same Los Angeles and Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council the City is negotiating with. The District agreement is effective January 1, 2026 for a five year term, applies to contracts awarded after its date including work under the District Measure E School Bond Program, and uses the same two thresholds staff recommends here, $750,000 at Section 2.2.1 and $150,000 at Section 2.2.2. The recommended thresholds also match Palmdale, which, negotiating with the same Trades Council, renewed its citywide Community Workforce Agreement in October 2025 using the same figures. Long Beach uses $750,000 for non-street work and $1,000,000 for street work. Los Angeles County uses a $5,000,000 threshold on its countywide agreement, reflecting the larger scale of County projects. A threshold set higher than the recommended figures, such as a single $1,000,000 with no specialty component, would place Culver City among the more permissive agencies in the region.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this mean the City must use union labor and shut out local, nonunion contractors?
No. Section 2.6.1 gives the City the absolute right to award contracts to any contractor regardless of whether that contractor has an agreement with any union, provided the contractor is ready, willing and able to comply with the Agreement on that project. Section 3.11 provides that employees are not required to become or remain union members as a condition of performing covered work. Below the threshold, contractors work under standard contracts with no Agreement terms. The competitive bidding process does not change.
Does the City pay money to the union under this Agreement?
No. The City makes no payment to the Trades Council. The only financial contributions involved are the wage and benefit trust fund contributions that the winning contractor pays to and for the workers on a covered project. Those are the workers’ earned compensation, not a payment to the union, and prevailing wages are already required on public works in California independent of any agreement.
Why $750,000 and not the $1,000,000 the Council already set in January?
On the multi-trade side, the two figures reach the identical projects, because no multi-trade project falls between them, so moving to $750,000 changes nothing there. The reason to act is the specialty threshold. A single $1,000,000 standard leaves nearly all specialty work uncovered. Adopting the $750,000 and $150,000 pair, and reconciling the January policy to it, gives the City one consistent standard and extends coverage to the recurring public works projects that a single high threshold would miss.
What does this cost the City to administer?
Setting a threshold does not change the adopted capital budget. The Agreement does carry an administrative cost, because the City must track compliance on covered projects and hire a CQA/CWA Administrator. Staff will size that cost as part of implementation. In exchange, the Agreement provides a no strike commitment and a defined dispute process that reduce the risk of a work stoppage delaying a covered City project.
How do we know this works for a city our size?
The Culver City Unified School District operates under a Community Workforce Agreement with this same Trades Council, effective January 1, 2026, using the same $750,000 and $150,000 thresholds staff recommends here. Palmdale has operated a two-threshold agreement with this Trades Council since 2018 and renewed it as a citywide Community Workforce Agreement in October 2025. Palmdale is a larger city than Culver City, so it is cited for the structure of its agreement rather than as a match in scale. Long Beach, El Monte, and Los Angeles County provide additional regional examples.
Can we change the thresholds later if they do not work?
The thresholds are a policy setting. The Council can revisit them. Staff recommends adding a trade type field to the capital intake process so that, going forward, the City can report exactly how many projects and dollars fall under the Agreement by category and adjust with full information.
Basis of the project analysis
The project counts and dollar figures in this report are drawn from the Critical Path Plans report for all capital improvement projects generated September 7, 2026, which lists ninety-five projects totaling $90,941,634, comprising $57,310,242 in new appropriation and $33,225,409 in carryover. Projects are sorted into multi-trade and specialty categories from the scope of work described in each project record, which is the basis a contract is written on. Contract type is fixed in the bid documents, so each project category is set when the work goes out to bid. Total dollar coverage at each threshold does not depend on the category, because it rests on project budgets. Contract award status is taken from the schedule and milestone record on each project page of the same report.
FISCAL ANALYSIS
Setting a coverage threshold does not by itself change the adopted capital budget. Covered projects are performed under the terms of the Agreement, which affect how construction labor is sourced and compensated on those projects but do not appropriate additional City funds. Prevailing wages are already required on public works in California. Administration of the Agreement, including compliance tracking, carries a staff cost that the City will size as part of implementation. The Agreement directs no payment from the City to the Trades Council.
ATTACHMENTS
1. 2026-10-13_ATT_Community Workforce Agreement with the Los Angeles and Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council
recommended action
MOTION(S)
That the City Council:
1. Authorize the City Manager to negotiate and execute a Community Workforce Agreement with the Los Angeles and Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council with coverage thresholds of $750,000 for multi-trade contracts and $150,000 for prime specialty contracts;
2. Authorize the City Attorney to review and prepare the necessary documents;
3. Authorize the City Manager to execute such documents on behalf of the City; and
4. Provide other direction to the City Manager as deemed appropriate.