Find-a-Contractor Masonry Buyer's Guide

Mike Sutter (center, left) discusses the rules of the MCAA’s Fastest Trowel on the Block competitiong during MASONRY MADNESS®.

March 2017

Things to Remember

Chairman’s Message

By Mike Sutter

I was raised in northern Ohio and I remember when talking about the weather in March it was said it would “come in like a lion and out like a lamb.” While I don’t have the same weather issues in Phoenix, I hope everyone’s weather is about to turn to warm and productive weather.

With winter gone and blue skies and sunshine surrounding you and able to get great production on your jobsites. Of course another Ohio saying was “April showers bring May flowers” so hopefully it doesn’t get too wet in your area of the country.

Since this is actually my first article that I am writing after World of Concrete/World of Masonry, I have to tell you what an awesome time we had there. For sure it was very busy from Sunday through Thursday it was also a great time to see everyone again and talk business and family. Thank you to our Australia Contractors Association members for joining us at the convention. We love talking to you about masonry in your country and a few of us would welcome the opportunity to return the favor and visit you in Australia! We had great discussions in our Roundtable discussions and we will probably change up the format at Midyear to smaller groups reporting back to the whole group. It was brought to our attention by a few members that they prefer that setup so we listened. Great job by Andy Sneed and Adam Waltho bringing the topics and leading the discussion. Also at WOC was our spouse’s tour of Wayne Newton’s mansion. They enjoyed the tour and talked about how lavish his mansion was, right in downtown Las Vegas. While finishing up about WOC, I must mention that Susie Odom was photo bombed at the Spec Mix party on Wednesday evening. I’m pretty sure it was her first photobomb so make sure you ask her about it! Well, I must mention one more thing about WOC. Did anyone notice which State swept the Fastest Trowel on the Block contest?

Next month is our MCAA online auction. The auction will run from 9:00 AM Tuesday, April 25th to 5:00 PM Thursday, April 27th. This is a great way to pick up masonry items at a great price. This is a major source of income for the MCAA so be sure to participate and help yourself and MCAA.

It may seem a little early but we need to save the dates for the MCAA Legislative Fly-in May 16th-18th. This should be a very productive trip with the new administration in place that may allow our representatives to actually get to work helping us out. Our Legislative Committee chaired by Bev McCauley has put together a list of topics that are important to our member contractors to discuss with our legislators. If you haven’t made the trip before or haven’t made it lately please put it on your schedule. We get a lot of work done on the Hill but also manage to have a good time on some side trips in the DC area. This year is no exception and we will be announcing the planned activities very soon on our website. It is important that you register for the event and also reserve your room early as the rooms always sell out and some members are scrambling for some very expensive rooms at the last minute. Reservations can be made on our website.

Another item to have on your watchlist is out silica train the trainer course that is traveling around the country. Remember that the new silica rule goes into effect on June 23rd and we all need to be ready. There must be a competent person on all our jobsites at all times and you need to have all employees trained for a one hour minimum on silica. So it can’t just be our safety director that travels from job to job, it needs to be all of our foremen. This train the trainer course allows you to train one person in your organization who then can go back to your company and train all your foremen and employees. With this such a hot topic with OSHA you can bet one of the first questions from a compliance officer will be “Who is your silica competent person and where is their certification?” If they are able to produce the person with the certification, that may be the end of the discussion right there. If not, you have just earned your first citation on this jobsites inspection.