Report of the MCAA Legislative Committee

Words: Joe Aker

MAC PAC

The MCAA had an extremely successful MAC PAC event at last year’s annual meeting. We rolled out the new club levels and welcomed the following people at the following levels:

Congressional Club

$1,200 Annual Contribution
  • Robert Barnes, Jr.
  • Joe Bonifate
  • Mackie Bounds
  • Calvin Brodie
  • Kevin Camarata
  • Tom Daniel
  • Dennis Deppen
  • John Jacob
  • Alan Johnson
  • Mark Kemp
  • Paul Odom
  • Paul Oldham
  • John Smith, Jr.
  • John Spencer
  • Christian Stein
  • Michael Sutter

Executive’s Club

$500 Annual Contribution
  • Danks Burton
  • Michael Palmer
  • Andy Sneed

Director’s Club

$250 Annual Contributio
  • Lynn Nash

Grassroots Club

$100 Annual Contribution
  • Jim O’Connor

Political Education Fund

The MCAA will begin a push for funds for the political education fund. This fund helps support our political activities of the MCAA and are company funds versus the personal type that the MAC PAC requires. The more we raise for the PEC the lower our political costs to the MCAA and the lower the percentage of what is not deductible from taxes for your member dues.

MCAA Issues

The MCAA has all of our current position papers on the MCAA website which can be found at www.masoncontractors.org. Look under legislative and you will find the position papers. The legislative committee recently met in person in Washington DC and discussed the future of the committee and looked at identifying new issues. An issue which will be brought to the forefront is employee misclassification.

In addition, the committee will work in 2016 to try to get Congress to dedicate funding to support high school vocational programs. The MCAA will look to model several programs around the country that are working and ask Congress to take dollars currently being spent on education and use them specifically to give incentives to schools to offer these programs. The MCAA is still working to develop the details to this program and welcomes input from members on needs in their local markets. We are excited to see where this effort will take us.

On a related topic we will also explore options for potential funding that would promote vocational training to the parents of children in high school. We are looking to change perceptions and gain support from parents in their children’s selection of the trades as a career choice. We are asking the Marketing and Workforce Development committees to work with us in developing resources to help promote this.

We will also begin to look at the issue of tax reform as we see it becoming a major issue in the next two years.

Lastly, the committee will be pushing the continued building of relationships with our representatives in order to build our influence in DC.

Social Media

Look for new ideas in respect to social media and the legislative committee. We will roll out new ideas as we draw nearer the legislative fly-in in May. We also feel this can be a great avenue for getting our message out about a career in masonry and a broader message to the parents about vocational training.

Silica

As we write this report we are somewhat hopeful that language known as the Hoeven amendment will be placed into the year end Omnibus bill that we expect Congress to pass the week of December 14. If this language is inserted and is passed into law, it will stop the rule in it’s tracks and send them back to nearly square one. OSHA would need years to comply with the requirements of the new law. If the amendment is not included, we can expect the new rule in early 2016. Likely a new law would be challenged in the courts. Silica is typically mentioned in the safety committee report, but this year much of the activity on silica has happened on the political front.
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