Report of the MCAA Technical Committee

A goal of the Technical Committee is to insure that key industry code committees have sufficient contractor representation. Those committees include the Council For Masonry Research, Masonry Standards Joint Committee and ASTM. I would like to thank those MCAA members who represent the contractor interest at those committees. Dick Felice as chairman of CMR; Donald Grant as MCAA's technical representative on the CMR tech committee; Dick Felice, Brian Grant and myself serve on MSJC; and Buddy Barnes, Dick Lauber, Joe Martino, Dick Felice, and Al Wendt serve on the ASTM. Thank you all for your effort. We need to expand our involvement in all of these codes councils. We not only need contractor participation but we also need a technical staff representative to serve as well. Much of the work is done away from the formal meetings. As contractors, we can only be watch dogs at the meetings. We don't have the time to work on a daily basis. And we currently don't have the staff expertise. They are good at what they do, but they are not engineers. I urge the Board to work hard to budget a new technical staff hire who will represent our interests full time. I know that we have attempted to accomplish this through our voluntary dues contributions, but the total contributions for all four areas have fallen short. I believe we must either increase dues sufficient to accomplish this task in next years budget or seek chapter support to fund the staffing of a full time technical staff person. I realize that this position is not an income producing staff member, but it is critical to protecting our individual business interests.

Mr. President, that is the report of the Technical Committee.