2011 Legislative Conference a Tremendous Success Words: Jeff Buczkiewicz/Public/News/20110528171000-1.jpg" width="600" height="338" border="0" alt="Congressman Tom Latham addresses a group of MCAA members at the Capitol Hill Club." />Congressman Tom Latham addresses a group of MCAA members at the Capitol Hill Club. The MCAA held its annual legislative conference on May 10-12, 2011. About 45 people attended this year’s conference, which is one of the larger turnouts the conference has had in years. A new addition to this year’s conference was about a half dozen South 40 members participating. By Thursday afternoon, our 45 participants had visited over 100 Congressional and Senate offices to discuss issues of our industry. Of these 100 offices, about 50 of them were with either the Congressman or Senator plus their staff. Some of the issues our group expressed concern over included: MILCON construction practices, the 3% Federal Withholding Law, Misclassification of Workers and the AMT. In addition several groups discussed concern over union pension obligations and general economic concerns. For the most part all the meetings were well received and most of our concerns were listened to. We are confident that we will make significant headway on at least two of our four major issues this year. The MCAA also presented their annual Freedom and Prosperity awards. The recipients of the awards this year were Congressmen Heath Shuler (NC), Congressman Paul Ryan (WI), Senator Mark Pryor (AR) and Senator John Cornyn (TX). We are thankful to our recipients for their support of small business concerns throughout the past year. For a full description of all MCAA position papers, please visit the Position Papers section of our website. If you are interested in attending future conferences, please feel free to contact the MCAA office so we can contact you in 2012.About: Legislative