Tucson and Phoenix can’t require companies working on city projects to pay what the city has decided is a prevailing wage, the Arizona Court of Appeals has ruled.
The three-judge panel rejected claims that because voters agreed in 2006 and 2016 to let cities set their own minimum wage, those same cities could require government contractors to pay employees a rate equal to similarly employed workers in the same field in the same community. None of that, the panel said, overrules a 1984 ballot measure specifically outlawing prevailing wages.
There was no immediate response from Tucson on whether it would seek Supreme Court review…