Two weeks before a new law takes effect requiring San Francisco construction contractors to hire local workers, city officials will ask the federal government to allow it to impose local-hiring rules on federally funded transportation projects.

Mayor Edwin M. Lee and other senior city officials held a press conference Wednesday at Palega Recreation Center and Playground, where the city’s parks department plans a $13 million renovation, to outline an implementation plan for the new local-hiring rules.

The requirements, which were approved by lawmakers late last year and are the most stringent in the nation, take effect March 24. They require city contractors to hire a minimum percentage of their construction workforce from within city limits.

“Local jobs has never been about a new promise — it’s always been about an old promise,” said Lee, whose staunch support for local-hiring rules marks a departure from the position of his predecessor, Gavin Newsom. “A promise that we would involve our communities in what we build for our city.”

But many transportation projects — including the $1.6 billion Central Subway project, which will link the South of Market neighborhood with Chinatown — are funded largely by the federal government, which outlaws local-hiring rules because it considers them discriminatory.

Local labor and activist groups have been pushing for the federal government to change its stance so that the city can impose local-hiring rules on the Central Subway project.

During Wedneday’s press conference, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Executive Director Nat Ford said he would lobby the federal government in an effort to extend the city’s local-hiring rules to the Central Subway project and other federally funded transportation projects

Ford said he would raise the issue with senior Federal Transit Administration officials next Wednesday during a scheduled lobbying visit to Washington, D.C.

“We’re all looking at opportunities for how we can use federal dollars to help support these local-hiring ordinances,” Ford told reporters. “It’s not clear right now from the FTA as to their position.”

The popularity of local-hiring efforts has expanded rapidly among San Francisco leaders over the past year, as the city has grappled with ways to use a multibillion-dollar capital budget to reduce unemployment, but the guidelines are bitterly opposed by some political leaders of nearby cities.

Assemblyman Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo) has led a regional charge against the rules, introducing legislation that would prevent local-hiring requirements from applying to any state-funded projects. 

Hill expressed frustration Wednesday after learning that San Francisco was pushing to apply its local-hiring law to federally funded projects.

“Just as the taxpayers in the Bay Area don’t want to pay for subsidized local hiring in San Francisco,” Hill said, “I wouldn’t think the taxpayers in Oregon would want to subsidize the local-hire ordinance in San Francisco.”