Safety has gotten attention — slowly

By Alexandra Berzon, Lisa Mascaro

Thursday, June 26, 2008 | 2 a.m.

More than a month ago, a sister of Harold Billingsley, the construction worker whose death was highlighted in a congressional hearing this week, e-mailed her three Nevada representatives in Washington to remind them about regulatory issues surrounding the fatality.

The response was less than enthusiastic. One lawmaker replied with an answer to a different issue. Another said he would consider the bill she asked him to support. A third has not yet answered.

“Did I necessarily expect a response? No,” Jacqueline Justin said Wednesday of her e-mail to Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign and Rep. Jon Porter. “Was I a little disappointed? Yes.”

The tepid response in many ways mirrored sentiment in Nevada after the Las Vegas Sun reported in March about safety lapses and lax enforcement by state regulators surrounding the string of deaths at Strip construction sites. Twelve workers have died in less than 19 months.

Nevada contractors, unions and safety regulators at first expressed little concern over the findings. Some were highly critical of the Sun. But as anxiety over the deaths grew in Congress, at national union headquarters and among construction industry safety organizations, attitudes in Nevada began to shift.

In recent weeks, unions reversed themselves and staged a walkout to protest what they said were unsafe working conditions at MGM Mirage’s CityCenter. The Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration ordered contractors to make safety improvements and federal OSHA inspectors and union safety experts descended on Las Vegas this month to review construction safety.

Among Nevada’s Washington delegates, Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley responded swiftly to reports of unsafe conditions. Berkley speaks weekly with the head of the building trades council in Las Vegas.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Berkley waited more than an hour on the dais for her turn to speak, and then grilled the federal OSHA chief.

Many of her Nevada colleagues have also warmed to the issue.

In the weeks before federal OSHA inspectors arrived in Las Vegas, the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has said little in public about the worker deaths, placed a phone call to OSHA and posed a question: What steps would be necessary for federal OSHA to intervene in state affairs?

Reid’s staff offered no instructions. They merely asked a question. But a question from the majority leader of the Senate, the state’s highest-ranking federal elected official, does send a message.

On June 5, the state announced federal officers would be on-site at CityCenter the following week to help with an inspection.

Porter has met with local, state and federal officials on the matter and asked the Appropriations Committee this week for federal funding for additional worker safety training in Nevada.

Nevada’s federal lawmakers would have had reason for political caution. They represent the casino companies fueling the $32 billion building boom on the Strip as well as the workers who belong to politically connected unions. Those companies and unions are large campaign contributors.

Greg McClelland, a safety consultant with a management office at the Ironworkers union that represents many workers on Strip projects, said he found great interest when he reached out two months ago to Reid’s office. McClelland also received inquiries from the offices of Berkley and Rep. Dean Heller, a Republican, about safety at Strip building sites.

That interest has accelerated in recent weeks. “Just now it seems like we’ve got a really coordinated effort,” McClelland said.

Reid said Wednesday he thinks “workplaces will be safer as a result” of the attention being paid, even if substantive changes have to wait until the next president, who he expects will be Sen. Barack Obama, a supporter of OSHA reform.

“If there’s new laws to be changed then we’ll be happy to work on those, or if there are new OSHA regulations, we’ll look forward to working with Obama on those,” Reid said.

Porter could not attend Tuesday’s committee hearing because he had a scheduled economic round table on tourism with congressional and White House officials, as well as industry executives including the spokesman for MGM Mirage, Nevada’s largest employer and the builder of CityCenter.

Yet his meeting last week with the OSHA chief in Washington led to his request for additional training funds. Money for training is not a top priority for unions, which generally prefer that employers pay for training and that government funding be used for enforcement of safety regulations on work sites.

But Porter said Nevada and other states have been without an increase in federal training funding for a decade. “There are far too many accidents happening,” Porter said Tuesday after he visited Billingsley’s family during a break in the hearing to deliver a flag flown in Billingsley’s honor over the Capitol. “If there are some things we need to do federally then we should address those.”

Still, the level of interest among Nevada lawmakers has differed.

Ensign said Wednesday the deaths on the Strip are “certainly a concern,” but his office has yet to be involved in any of the discussions.

Ensign said he has not participated in any meetings, correspondence or other actions on the issue. He notes he does not serve on any committee in Congress that has jurisdiction over these issues.

“There’s too many people who have died, especially on the CityCenter project,” Ensign said. “There are laws out there — are they being enforced? Is there stricter regulation that needs to be had? It is something that definitely should be looked into.”

Another Billingsley sibling thinks lawmakers are paying greater attention to the issue.

“I wanted the Nevada delegation to start taking this issue seriously and start looking for answers,” said Billingsley’s sister Monique Cole, who attended Tuesday’s hearing with her husband.

Now, she said, “the tide turned.”