Masonry Magazine April 2009 Page. 44
VISION 2020
Vision 2020: A Timely Idea
Can widespread municipal construction requiring the use of masonry be a reality in 11 years? By Chris Mayo
Pick up a newspaper, turn on the news, and listen to the radio. It won't be long before you hear about our struggling economy. The talk may begin with Wall Street or the banking industry, but the floundering construction industry eventually will be included in the report.
When times are tough, our instinct often is to tighten our belts and weather the storm. But some strategists suggest that during tough times, we should look for opportunities. In many ways, Vision 2020 is a case and point.
Vision 2020 was born through a cooperative effort between the National Concrete Masonry Association (NCMA) and the MCAA. During a meeting in 2008, the two groups recognized that identifying areas of common interest through which they can work together simply makes sense. They concluded that the masonry trades have lost some market share during the years, and a concerted effort to regain and, ultimately, surpass what was lost will be of great benefit to the industry as a whole.
Mackie Bounds, president and CEO of Brazos Masonry Inc. and VP of the MCAA, was the originator of the idea for Vision 2020. "We were trying to come up with strategies to recover some of our lost market share, and there were lots of ideas being tossed around," says Bounds. "But most of them were things we'd touched on before, like calling key accounts, or talking to architects and engineers. I suggested that we needed to forget the old ideas and adopt a grassroots strategy: talk to city councils, state and federal legislatures, and school boards, and encourage building code mandates that require new construction be masonry."
Generating an idea is one thing, but generating a workable plan is another. The group looked at municipalities that have adopted ordinances requiring a percentage of masonry construction. Bounds was familiar with Farmer Branch, Texas, for example, which requires 70 percent of new commercial construction be done with masonry products. The group asked, "What if?" What if there were a concerted effort to make this happen in municipalities across the United States and Canada?
The vision
"Vision 2020 is a grassroots program that will create an army of small groups of promotion people to approach cities, counties and municipalities across the United States and Canada, and explain the advantages of building with masonry products," says Bill Holden, president of Block USA (Birmingham, Ala.) and immediate past-chairman of the NCMA. "We'll ask communities to insure their own success by mandating that a percentage of their new buildings are done with masonry."
Ann Wolter is a consultant for Vision 2020 and the coordinator of www.MasonrySystems.org, a Web site created to serve as a unified source for information on masonry. "We're asking people to share a long-term vision for their communities and have a laser focus on an end goal," she says. "We need to understand the challenges that our communities are facing and focus our efforts on the true, long-term owners of buildings municipalities, school districts, and state and federal governments. No one has a greater stake in the quality of what's built in our communities than the communities themselves. Masonry and masonry guidelines add value, beauty, durability, safety and tax-base stability."
The most exciting characteristics of Vision 2020 are in the long-term aspect and the emphasis on focus. Although masonry trade associations have collaborated in the past, the collaborations historically haven't been goal driven for the long term.
"Vision 2020 unites our industry," says Bounds. "Over the years, we've become fragmented, with everyone pushing their own product and their own expertise. People see brick, block, stone, marble and granite as separate products. What we