The new head of the Maine State Housing Authority has proposed rules – expected to be approved next week – requiring contractors working on state funded housing to offer health insurance to their workers and comply with an affirmative action plan designed to bring more women into the construction trades.

Dale McCormick, who was named to head the MSHA by Gov. John Baldacci when she was termed-out of her job as state treasurer, said she was proposing the new contractor rules because “it’s the right thing to do.”

The rules would apply to about $30 million in projects that will be bid later this year and probably built sometime next summer.

McCormick has proposed a set of rules that will be voted on by the MSHA board of directors on Aug. 16. Three of the five proposed regulations reiterate existing law, she said, but two break new ground: the requirement for healthcare coverage and on-the-job training for women and, to a lesser degree minorities, for contracts of $1 million or more.

The affirmative action program is modeled after one already in place for federally financed Department of Transportation (DOT) projects.

Healthcare and affirmative action are the toughest for contractors, said John Butts, executive director of the Associated Constructors of Maine, but he’s not pleased with other aspects of the plan, including a crackdown on the construction trades for using independent contractors.

Butts believes that in this busy building market, some contractors will simply choose not to bid on Housing Authority work, and less competition will drive up the price. “They will walk the path of least resistance,” he said.

Butts questioned why McCormick was going out on her own to make new rules, when the Legislature already has reviewed and ultimately rejected similar plans.

“The Legislature at least ought to look at this to see if it’s good policy for the Maine State Housing Authority,” he said.

McCormick was a carpenter and the first woman in the nation to complete a carpentry apprenticeship with the carpenters union before going into the Senate and ultimately the job of state treasurer. She founded the non-profit Women’s Unlimited to help women on welfare move into good-paying jobs.

Women Unlimited partnered with the state DOT to bring more women into construction jobs there and now Maine is one of leading states in the country in terms of the percentage of women doing DOT construction work.

The proposed rule would require contractors and subcontractors to do 700 hours of on-the-job training for every $1 million worth of work toward the goal of having women make up 6.9 percent of the workforce and people of color a half a percent.

“It is what is completely ordinary now in the transportation construction industry,” McCormick said. “Everybody knows this is an industry that’s crying out for workers,” and the program would bring more workers into the trade.

Requiring contractors to provide healthcare coverage is “in line with the policy of the state of Maine,” to get more people insured, McCormick said.

“Housing is economic development. MSHA creates jobs with public monies. Why would we want to create jobs that don’t pay a living wage or don’t have health insurance? It would be a waste of money,” she said.

The other contentious piece of the proposed rules is a requirement that contractors and subcontractors have to “properly classify employees as workers rather than independent contractors and treat them accordingly for purposes of workers compensation insurance coverage, unemployment taxes, income tax withholding, prevailing wage and benefit rates and overtime wage rates.”

Butts agreed this is already the law, but said the construction trades were unfairly being singled out for the use of independent contractors when it is common practice in a lot of industries.

Some workers “want to operate as independent contractors and that’s the only way they’ll work,” he said, yet the employer is held accountable. “It’s a Hobson’s choice. You take this guy on and be accused of misclassifying him or not do the work.”

“Why is there any need to specify this in your contract standards?” he asked. “The law is the law and let the agencies that are charged with enforcing it take care of it. The MSHA doesn’t have jurisdiction.”