Today we filed an amicus curiae or friend of the court brief on behalf of the General Contractors Association, in another Okada Trucking related case. At issue in the case is whether a C-5 renovation license allows a contractor to remove and replace jalousie windows in a school renovation project. The bigger issue is whether the Okada Trucking decision of 2002 can be used to claim a monopoly of all specialty license work to specialty license holders.
This case is of special interest to me and therefore I am so glad we were able to help the GCA with this matter, because it brings full circle a case I worked on three months after starting at Damon Key — involving one of the phases of the Stadium refurbishing projects. The issue (back in 1993) was whether a general contractor had to have a specialty license to do painting and waterproofing work on a construction project, or whether the general's license allowed it to do specialty license work. The case generated an inquiry with the Contractors License Board of what exactly the scope of a general contractor's license may be, and the board answered that for the construction of a building, as long as the work involved more than two specialty trades or crafts, the general could do the whole job with its general contracting license, except for work that required a separate permit, including plumbing, electrical, and elevator work. The Board's interpretation was memorialized in meeting minutes which were in turn used by us in a number of different bid protests through the years.
This was the law until the Okada Trucking decision came along in 2002. In that case, the Supreme Court reviewed the licensing laws and the Board's administrative rules, and noted that the Board automatically awarded a number of specialty licenses to general engineering and building contractors upon licensure. The Court decided that this must be the only work the Board believed the general engineering and building contractor capable of performing itself, and so ruled.
In fact, as the 1993 meeting minutes demonstrated, the reason the Board issued separate licenses was in order to increase, not decrease, the work a general contractor could perform, by allowing a general contractor to still work on a project even if there was no building involved, and even if the project involved less than three specialty trades or crafts.
However, presumably because the meeting minutes were never before the court until reconsideration, it denied the rquest, and Okada became the law, disrupting contracts and making construction more expensive.
The present case deals with renovation. The C-5 renovation license is written very broadly and in fact has been interpreted somewhat broadly by the Board. The question is whether the Okada decision dictates that in renovation, a contractor must hire specialty contractors for all work that is covered by a specialty license, or whether the contractor can perform any work necessary to complete the renovation (aside from work requiring a special permit, of course). A ruling on this issue against contractors will have a potentially reverberating effect, just as Okada did when it wsas first published.
We feel strongly that we are correct on this issue, but invite others to read the case and make their own judgments.