Press Room - Article

Nonunion Construction Cos. Appeal to Chula Vista Residents to Back Project

Jimmy Hoffa is alive and well — or it’s his double — posing as “Lucky Louie The Labor Leader” on a flier sent to Chula Vista residents by a local builders’ group blaming trade unions for an “all or nothing” approach that thwarted labor negotiations with the developer of a proposed mega-hotel and convention center in that city.

The not so tongue-in-cheek mid-August mailer, with the headline “Missing Project” above a rendering of the $1 billion complex proposed by Gaylord Entertainment Inc., was sent recently to 15,000 registered Chula Vista voters by the San Diego Chapter of Associated Builders and Contractors.

“Be on the lookout for Lucky Louie’s accomplices,” it reads.

The organization’s hope, said President and Chief Executive Officer George Hawkins, is that the recipients would voice support for the proposed project to politicians and agency appointees who have the ability to make it happen.

“What we’re trying to do is attribute the problem to the source, and the source is organized labor,” said Hawkins. “I think Joe construction worker doesn’t have a strong interest in whether this project is union or nonunion. He just wants to go to work on a quality project, especially if it’s near home.”

Voters with a record of going to the polls were selected over non-voters because it was assumed they’d be more apt to express their concern, he explained.

The project, touted by many supporters as an economic shot in the arm for Chula Vista that has seen the bulk of tourism development go elsewhere in the county, has been on the drawing board for more than two years.

Gaylord Arrived Unsolicited

Gaylord, which has hotels and conference centers in its headquarters city of Nashville, Tenn.; Kissimmee, Fla.; Grapevine, Texas, and the Washington, D.C., area, came unsolicited to Chula Vista looking for a West Coast location.

Publicly traded Gaylord agreed to negotiate with the San Diego County Building and Construction Trades Council and the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, but backed out of the talks in early July citing unreasonable demands. A month later, the company resumed negotiations with Chula Vista and the San Diego Unified Port District. Meanwhile, the unions, saying Gaylord can’t be depended on to hire local workers for the project, said they were no longer in negotiations with the company.

Tom Lemmon, who has represented the Building and Construction Trades Council, and Jerry Butkiewicz, who represented the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council in the negotiation drama, are characterized in the mailer as “known accomplice No. 1 and No. 2,” respectively.

Butkiewicz said he thought the flier “was really unprofessional.”

“Don’t you wonder why Gaylord keeps coming back and coming back?” Butkiewicz said. “It raises the question as to whether labor really is the problem. I think Gaylord wants a sweetened deal out of the port and more money out of Chula Vista.

“Stay tuned to see it.”

Lemmon dismissed the flier as “just a tactic.”

“They think they can probably get some yardage out of it,” he said.

He said the unions remain steadfast in their goal of wanting an agreement that jobs on the proposed project are filled exclusively by residents of Chula Vista, the South Bay and San Diego County, and that they are union members or agree to being represented by the unions.

“We don’t think that’s impossible,” he added. “We think they’re here and they deserve those jobs.”

Response To Mailers

Lemmon said last week that he’d received roughly a half-dozen e-mails in response to the mailer and they were split evenly between favoring and not favoring the union’s position.

He said an earlier mailer by the construction companies’ group that went out Aug. 3 with the caption: “Why Are Union Bosses Raining on Chula Vista’s Parade?” prompted a greater response.

The planned development consisting of a hotel with up to 2,000 rooms, 400,000-square-foot convention center, restaurants and retail shops could create as many as 6,500 temporary construction jobs and 2,000 permanent jobs once the complex is up and running.

Sylvia Rios, chairwoman of the seven-member port commission, said she’s received no citizen feedback from the builder group’s most recent mailer. Yet, she also said that the commissioners could wrap up negotiations with Gaylord — the first step in the proposed project becoming reality — within the next couple weeks.

While the port’s trades are unionized and the board has typically leaned in favor of unions, its negotiations with Gaylord don’t hinge on meeting the unions’ requests, she added.

“We were not party to the negotiations with the labor unions and Gaylord,” she said. “That’s something they need to work out for themselves.

“We don’t like this type of conflict. We wish that was not the case, and we do want to keep good relations with labor.”

A spokesman for Gaylord said the company had no comment on the mailer.

Meanwhile, Hawkins said another mailer with a working title of “Build Our Bayfront” is being designed and could go out within the next couple weeks.

“We’ve attempted to lay the blame (for failed labor negotiations) on the unions, because we think — no — we know that’s where the blame is,” he said. “Now, the next step is to move forward.”

Hawkins said his 256-member organization has an annual budget of $1 million. All but about a half-dozen of its members are non-union. The mailer campaign will cost about $36,000, and none of its funding came from Gaylord, he added.