A builders’ professional group in Colorado has announced it is taking the City of Denver to court due to its vaccine mandates.
The Colorado Contractors Association says that the mandate is too restrictive and violates the contracts clause of the U.S. Constitution by impinging on the right of a company to do work with a public entity.
In filing in the federal U.S. District Court for Colorado, which is based in Denver, the lawsuit aims to block the vaccine mandate for construction contractors who do work for the city. The brief also states both that the mandate itself is unconstitutional and, as framed, does not apply to contractors.
“Denver cannot legally or practically conscript the private sector” to enforce the mandate, reads the brief.
Joined by several other contractors’ associations, the Colorado Contractors Association additionally argues that the mandate will have the effect of depleting the available contractor workforce, resulting in the delay of any number of city construction projects.
In an interview with the Construction Dive, Tony Milo, executive director of the Colorado Contractors Association, said his group had earlier met with Denver officials and suggested that they adopt President Biden’s more flexible executive order requiring companies with 100 or more employees to either mandate the vaccine or have employees undergo regular testing.
“But they flatly rejected all of our requests,” Milo says of those meetings.
Denver issued a vaccine mandate on August 2, which contained a compliance date for all city workers and contractors of September 30.
The lawsuit further agues that “up to half of the employees in the construction industry are vaccine hesitant, not because, as may be argued, they have some political opposition, but because the construction industry is largely made up of communities of color who are vaccine hesitant due to mistrust of the government.”
In submitting the filing, the Colorado Contractors Association is seeking to nullify the city order only as it applies to contractors.
By Garry Boulard