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The Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries prevailing wage advisory committee will meet next week with a new member and a new agenda.

Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian last week appointed Carl Redman, vice president of Bear Electric, to the 11-member committee, which sets prevailing wage rates in the state. Redman will replace John Killin, executive director of the Independent Electrical Contractors and the Associated Builders and Contractors of Oregon who stepped down in an effort to reduce the number of paid representatives on the committee.

“I’m not really coming in with an agenda,” said Redman, who is also the president of Innovation Construction. “I noticed there was only one person on the committee that was actually in the business of employing people. Everyone else was paid representatives.”

Redman joins the group just as it sets its legislative agenda for the 2009 session. Among the concepts it will consider at its Sept. 17 meeting is a bill to require timely payment to workers on a prevailing wage project and increased penalties for contractors reporting false wages. BOLI proposals also include providing more time to give notice on contractor bond claims and adjusting the prevailing wage fee calculator.

“Most of that’s just little technical fixes,” said Bob Shiprack, executive secretary of the Oregon Building Trades Council and a member of the committee. “The one of substance is the bizarre case where a contractor didn’t pay his workers. That bill will clarify there are paydays. Obviously for union contractors our paydays are set by a collective bargaining agreement.”

Prevailing wage is shaping up to be a much smaller issue in the 2009 session than it was two years ago when legislators wrestled over the application of prevailing wage rates in projects funded by a mix of public and private dollars. Instead, the committee is likely to look for ways to make wage surveys easier for Oregon contractors to help boost the number of surveys returned to BOLI this year.

The BOLI committee is just one of many groups that could bring prevailing wage issues to the legislature, however.

“We haven’t developed an agenda within prevailing wage, but I’m sure there are other groups that have,” said Killin. “I would expect there’s some agenda coming there, but I don’t know what it is.”