AIL: Rent, lease back nothing new

Why are governments so sneaky? The article on the rental agreement of a new 625 bed new Kootenai County jail is so diabolical it is sickening.

The $64 question is: Why rent, instead of own, a jail in the first place?

Renting or lease back arrangements of government buildings are nothing new. I worked on one in California, and saw them in Oklahoma, Texas and South Carolina too. It’s a way to avoid paying prevailing wages mandated through a 1931 law called the Davis-Bacon Act and cutting construction labor costs. Davis-Bacon was implemented to stop abuses after a New York contractor rounded up a slew of southern black men and was able to under bid all the local New York contractors on government building contracts. It was nothing more than a reverse form of outsourcing to Asia where sweat shops pay pennies on the dollar. And we see it today across the U.S. with (undocumented or otherwise) immigrants in the under-the-table pay home building industry in every state but here.

So here we sit, in lowest paying Idaho, wondering why shared poverty is everywhere around us through food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, and earned income credit handouts, and our local county government wants to concoct a scheme to build a new jail to house a swelling population of underemployed young men who turn to crime by scheming a way to exploit underemployed young men. The irony is so perverse here it’s disgusting.

Uh-oh … a construction worker might make a whole $40,000 a year and actually move out on his own, support his own offspring and buy a house. We can’t have that!

Many of us are Christians who give lip service that we should “love our neighbors as ourselves.” Just not the neighbors that will labor on our next leased-back-to-the-taxpayers jail. Enjoy your shared poverty!

MIKE RENO

Post Falls