Hitting the road

Daily Point

A solemn day for Bernie

President Donald Trump was in the air even before Bernie Sanders launched into his stump speech about inequality and the grip of money on politics.

At an early Wednesday event in Derry, New Hampshire, Sanders said he was wearing a tie because he was about to get on a plane and go cast his vote in the Senate impeachment trial.

“Today is a serious and solemn day for the country,” Sanders said before addressing the concern that stop-Bernie Democrats have about his intensely loyal followers and the Vermont senator’s impact on the 2020 general election.

No matter who wins the Democratic nomination, “we will be united around the winner,” he told the crowd of more than a hundred.

But some in the crowd were more suspicious of the party establishment, as with one questioner who asked Sanders about Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez having “stacked the DNC rules committee” with people who aren’t Sanders supporters. The questioner worried about a “repeat of 2016.”

Sanders said the eventual nominee would have “enormous power” over committees like that and quickly moved on.

Mark Chiusano is in New Hampshire, as the 2020 Democratic hopefuls change venues for the season’s first primary. Follow Mark on Instagram @mjchiusano or @NewsdayOpinion for his latest dispatches.

—Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano

Talking Point

Rearing its head

It’s baaack.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s budget proposal includes new language requiring prevailing wage — the higher hourly wage usually part of collective-bargaining agreements — to be paid on many projects that the public funds from any level of government.

And Long Island developers and business leaders are concerned.

Last year, developers and union leaders negotiated a compromise on prevailing wage that seemed ready to go. But at the last minute, as the legislative session came to an end in June, the deal fell apart — and the State Legislature never passed the final measure.

The new proposal goes beyond the compromise reached last spring, local business advocates told The Point. It requires prevailing wage to be paid on any project that receives 30 percent of its projected costs in state and local public funds, which was the threshold agreed to in June. But the troubling part for the business and builder community is that the budget allows for a yet-to-be-established “public subsidy board” to change the thresholds, and determine which projects and which public funding would be included.

That seems to leave a lot of uncertainty about which projects would have to pay prevailing wage, and which would not. And for a high-cost area like Long Island, where it’s already difficult and expensive to develop needed housing and other projects, that’s enough to worry builders.

“To have an unelected board be able to do that is just unacceptable,” Long Island Builders Institute chief executive Mitch Pally told the Point. 

Pally noted that the board could be just as much a concern for union leaders as for builders; depending on who’s on it, the threshold could change in either direction. 

For now, the Building and Construction Trades Council of Nassau and Suffolk Counties isn’t taking a definitive position on the new language, saying that the organization is doing an “internal assessment” of where to set the appropriate limit “which satisfies all parties.”

Association for a Better Long Island executive director Kyle Strober said the prevailing-wage language legislation is particularly worrisome at a time when the state budget is stressed. Too-stringent and expensive requirements could stop economic development on Long Island. That, combined with the budgetary worries, would be a “recipe for disaster for our region’s economy,” he said.

—Randi F. Marshall @RandiMarshall

Pencil Point

Caucus ruckus

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Puzzle Point

Puzzling primaries

A progressive anagram — and what other kind of anagram would appeal to certain Democrats these days — is a word puzzle with a series of answers in which you add one letter to the previous answer and re-arrange the letters to get the next answer. For example, by adding one letter to each word, “is” becomes “sir” which becomes “airs” which becomes “stair.”

Here’s a progressive anagram for you to solve, keyed to the 2020 presidential race.

THE NEW HAMPSHIRE DILEMMA

“Hey,  _ _ ,” Bobby said to his father, Hank. “You’re not going to Biden’s rally, are you? He’s so boring.”

“Aw, c’mon,” Hank said. “He gets a bad _ _ _ . He’s got some energy. You watch. As they  _ _ _ _ down the field, he’s going to be the last one standing.”

“Only if he _ _ _ _ _ the benefits of everyone else’s mistakes,” Bobby retorted. “I wish he would _ _ _ _ _ _ to bigger dreams for our country, like Bernie or Warren.”

“Well, neither of us is going to the rally if I can’t finish making the _ _ _ _ _ _ _  to the car,” Hank said. “The hills here in New Hampshire take a bigger toll on an old clunker like this than the _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _  in Iowa.”

“True,” Bobby said. “These _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _  are going to take a toll on all of us before they’re over.”

— Michael Dobie @mwdobie