Instructors at Cement Masons Local 555 training center are looking for a trailer. Their trailer. Local 555 apprenticeship coordinator Jeremy Kendall arrived at work Feb. 6 and found that someone had cut the lock off the back gate, and the lock that attached a trailer to a trailer hitch. The trailer—painted with the union’s logo and the words “Your future starts with us”—was gone, along with 10 sets of hand tools worth about $3,000 total that had been packed up for a visit to the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, a women’s prison. Local 555 is one of several construction unions that are conducting outreach to inmates, offering the chance of a career with good union wages and benefits when they get out. Local 555 business manager Geoff Kossak says he and others looked in the area for the trailer, and filed a police report and an insurance claim, but haven’t found it yet.
“We’re not really hopeful,” Kossak said. The training center and union hall are located at 12812 NE Marx St., an industrial area. Kossak said similar crimes drove a neighbor, Far West Recycling, to install an electrified fence.
