People who suspect that governments routinely waste taxpayers’ money are absolutely right, and we can only wish the problem were limited to easily derided pork projects like the infamous “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska. But it isn’t, and the accumulation of small abuses costs taxpayers a bundle, too. Nobody gets too mad about them because they are, taken individually, relatively small.

Such is the case with Oregon’s prevailing wage law, which requires the public to pay higher wages for most projects than private businesses would pay. It is a pervasive irritant that drives up the cost of schools, roads, bridges and buildings, and even complicates small, symbolic projects like the installation of photovoltaic cells on top of Bend’s new parking garage.

A few months ago, SunEnergy Power offered to install the solar array, which would give the city important green-energy bragging rights and also, for a fixed period, a fairly low-cost stream of solar energy. At the end of the agreed-upon period, the city could buy the solar array if it wanted to. But barring such a purchase, the deal wasn’t supposed to cost the city anything.

That might still be true, but there’s a question mark: whether or not the installation qualifies as a public improvement project for prevailing wage purposes. To find out, says Downtown Manager Jeff Datwyler, the city would need to procure a letter of determination from the state Bureau of Labor and Industries. So, at the very least, the prevailing wage has created a bureaucratic hassle.

But the city might choose to skip the hassle, assume the project requires the prevailing wage and simply pay it. This could well be the most sensible option, as Datwyler says the law may drive up the project cost only slightly. Though the city hasn’t estimated the difference, Datwyler believes “that whatever wages were paid would have been close to that [prevailing wage] anyway.”

Though small, the difference would still exist, and it’s “something that wasn’t completely covered in the financial pro forma for the no-cost system,” says Datwyler. Thanks to artificially inflated wages, then, what was to have been a no-cost system could become a low-cost system. The difference almost certainly won’t be big enough to kill the project, and that’s good. The solar array has significant symbolic value.

Consider all of the public projects funded in Oregon every year, however, and you can see what a big-dollar problem the prevailing wage is. Lawmakers know this, of course, but they’re not too interested in doing much. Not only is the prevailing wage a somewhat obscure phenomenon most of their constituents don’t complain about, but, more importantly, it’s something organized labor really, really likes. And organized labor spends a lot of money putting people in office, mostly Democrats.

Thanks, in part, to the generosity of labor unions, Gov. Ted Kulongoski won a second term last month, and Democrats won control of both chambers of the Legislature. Kulongoski, in fact, recently chose the former chief lobbyist of the teachers’ union as his chief of staff and the former president of the state AFL-CIO as his deputy chief of staff.

We don’t have a crystal ball, but we think we can identify one significant source of government waste that won’t be eliminated next legislative session.