Dozens of unionized construction workers pushed back against Chris Collins on Wednesday as Erie County became a flashpoint in their effort to make the state’s industrial development agencies friendlier to organized labor and the prevailing wage.

“It’s just a media smear, and it’s getting out of hand here,” Samuel Capitano of Laborers Local 210 said of the county executive’s campaign against the County Legislature for failing, as yet, to let the Erie County IDA help nonprofit groups with their construction projects.

Collins wants county lawmakers to approve his bill, which lacks a requirement that construction workers on those civic projects receive the higher prevailing wage.

Such a rule has been written into some bills in Albany that would affect all IDAs in New York. But those bills have yet to become law, and unions are worried that counties like Erie might find their own paths around the prevailing wage and make Albany’s debate moot.

“It is just what it is — an end-around of the IDA reform,” Capitano told Erie County lawmakers gathered Wednesday to discuss the Collins approach. Capitano’s message was both an attempt to air the union view and a pep talk for any sympathetic Democrat withering under Collins’ recent attacks.

“The correct thing to do is what this Legislature is doing,” he said, with many of his remarks met by applause from the 40 to 50 workers who packed the gallery. They want lawmakers to approve a competing version of Collins’ bill — one requiring that nonprofit groups pay the prevailing wage and offer apprentice programs on their government-aided expansions.

Capitano and Allison Duwe of the Coalition for Economic Justice argued that workers earning the prevailing wage—a Depression-era reform — are better able to contribute to their local economies and that they are generally more productive.

Collins on Wednesday began an advertising blitz on local radio to prod election-minded legislators into letting an arm of the Erie County Industrial Development Agency—the Industrial Land Development Corp. — arrange tax-exempt financing for private schools, colleges and assorted nonprofit groups planning expansions.

In years past, the IDA itself could have arranged such loans — with low-cost terms because the lenders’ interest earnings are tax-free. However, the state-given authority that lets IDAs arrange such financing expired early in 2008 as state lawmakers debate those union-championed requirements. Meanwhile, nonprofit groups have either put projects on hold or arranged other loans.

Collins and the Erie County IDA’s lawyers found a way around the logjam with the ILDC. With other counties taking similar routes, Collins is pressing the County Legislature to promptly approve Erie’s enabling legislation.

Requiring the prevailing wage stops the effort dead, he says, because it wipes out the savings from tax-exempt financing. He says legislators bucking him on the measure are indifferent to job creation. And he wants union leaders to realize that a job is better than no job.

“They think it’s a debate between the prevailing wage and the regular wage,” he has said. “I think it’s a debate between regular wage and no wage.”

The focus of most of Collins’ rage, Legislature Chairwoman Lynn M. Marinelli, D-Town of Tonawanda, says the county executive overstates the need to pass the bill immediately and cannot back up his claim that $200 million in construction activity has been stalled. But she has set a special session for 3 p. m. Friday in which legislators should approve a version.

Legislator Timothy M. Kennedy, the Buffalo Democrat who heads the Economic Development Committee, said he wants the successful bill to contain safeguards for workers. But Collins aides say they should be able to corral eight lawmakers to approve their version.

They’ll be counting on votes from Republicans Raymond W. Walter of Amherst, who engaged Kennedy in debate Wednesday, and Edward A. Rath III, also of Amherst.

The third Republican, John

J. Mills of Orchard Park, said he will be out of town and cannot attend Friday’s session.

Collins will have to find his other six votes within the 12- member Democratic caucus that Capitano tried to solidify Wednesday.