TPT March 2016

G LOBA L MARKE T P L AC E

Elsewhere in steel . . . › A former Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Co site in Benwood, West Virginia, has been repurposed as a facility for inspecting and threading pipe for the natural gas industry. The Intelligencer and Wheeling News-Register reported on 7 December that JLE Industries (Dunbar, Pennsylvania) invested over $6mn in refurbishing the 80,000-square-foot plant. Closed for 20 years before JLE began the conversion in July of last year, it was set for a January opening. The pipe is to be retrieved from drilling sites. Before processing it will be scanned for defects by magnetic resonance imaging.

This end-run around the plain intent of the Buy American Act was not in itself very remarkable. (Noel Brinkerhoff reported on AllGov.com [14 September] that the inspector general of the Department of Defense found procurement violations in fully one-third of federal contracts in a sample batch examined by the agency.) But the two exemptions from the policy of using American steel exclusively led to a lawsuit against the FHWA in which manufacturers were joined by a labour union and a trade group. Granting summary judgment to the plaintiffs, Judge Mehta found that the FHWA regulators had improperly dealt themselves the exemptions and moreover apparently pulled the rationale for one of them “out of thin air”. He harked back to the 1997 FHWA memorandum that declared the iron and steel content necessary to warrant an exemption. In his view, neither then nor in the present case has that percentage been explained – still less justified. “The [FHWA] says nary a word about why 90 per cent was chosen as the threshold value to mean ‘predominately,’” wrote Judge Mehta, who was nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama. “Not a single word. And defendants’ post-hoc efforts to rationalise the choice of that number ring hollow.” › Whether the ruling in this case will revive anti-protectionist sentiment against the Buy American Act remains to be seen. But the title of Mr Brinkerhoff’s article in AllGov – “ Half of Navy Contracts Violate Buy American Rules ” – suggests that, at the very least, notice has been taken of dubious compliance with the strictures of the law, even at quite high levels.

Rules on Drones

Federal reasser tion of command of US airspace opens a rift with local authorities on the regulation of recreational drones “New York City is different from the cornfields of Iowa. That should be obvious to everyone, but it isn’t reflected in FAA rules.” It was only a matter of time before someone – in this case, New York City Council member Daniel R Garodnick – joined the issue of differences between the US Federal

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M ARCH 2016