On a rainy mid-November afternoon, the only sound coming from vacant building lots clustered along the Willamette River is the insistent honking of a flock of geese. Gone are the hardhats, toolbelts and backhoes that for the past couple of years marked the beginning of the long-awaited conversion of industrial land along the river to badly needed housing.
Work has ground to a halt on the redevelopment of several lots that are slated to link the city’s downtown to the University of Oregon and alleviate a housing shortage in the state’s second-largest city. Developers hoped to build more than 1,000 new units on the property, but after completing the second apartment building on the site in mid-June, they have put down their hammers.
At issue: a dispute between the developer, Eugene Riverfront District LLC, and the Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industries, known as BOLI, over whether the privately funded portions of the project should pay prevailing wage. BOLI is the arbiter of Oregon’s prevailing wage law. That law requires in part that if a project uses more than $750,000 in public funds, the project’s developers must pay “prevailing” — that is, union wages — to workers on the project…