From the Editor

Headaches and Brickbats

Tom Inglesby, editor
tom@editor7.com

The holiday hangovers are letting up some by February but new headaches are fast replacing them. Tax time is days away; new rules and regulations can be expected from Washington and all the states. Change is in the air and it isn't just spring.

The current economic climate is, as someone recently said, not exactly vacation weather. Cold chills of reality are blowing from revenue-short state legislatures. Washington grapples with deficits as far as the eye can see. From the perch of January, when this is being written, the hawks of war are circling and the doves of peace are hiding. And standing knee deep in all of this is the small business owner — you most likely — wondering if the tides of change will wash away all the years of work or clean the air of imbalance and bias so the business can move forward.

Prophets of profits on Wall Street and Main Street seem to agree that the chill will continue for a few more months, until many of the issues that breed discontent and concern are resolved. Assuming they will be resolved. War, economic malaise (sorry, Jimmy, your words are more valid today than in 1979), reforms and regulations will take up much of the news, leading many to predict the news media itself is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more the media talks about how bad things are, the more people will accept that as fact and make things worse.

Most states are scratching hardscrabble to find money to continue the building programs they started a boom year or two ago. Some of those projects are the schools and public buildings that mason contractors bid on. At least one mason contractor, Shook Masonry in Dayton, Ohio, has set up a special company just to bid on the state's school construction work, estimated in Ohio at $700 million. Meanwhile, other states are cautioning that schools and school construction are on the short list to be shorted in 2003. California is looking at a deficit of $34 billion — that's billion with a "B" — and no way out but through added taxes and cut programs. New York is facing a $9 billion shortfall and cuts across the board.

The days of big government are over, some politicians claim. Maybe. But without those government projects, a lot of mason contractors are going to be hurting more than ever. Coupled with increases in everything that costs anything, from insurance to permits to equipment to licenses, contractors are getting nervous and rightly so. Unless you specialize in buildings for the defense establishment or defense contractors, money is going to be harder to find coming from Washington.

So what can the government do to help construction? Maybe changing the paradigm will help. In January, Linda Conlin, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Trade Development, and Gary Garczynski, president of the National Home Builders Association, signed a Memorandum of Understanding to establish a framework for a public-private partnership designed to encourage and support the growth of U.S. exports in the building industry. What will be exported needs to be fleshed out.

It might be hard to make any money exporting your masons to Chile or China to build new homes there.

Correction
The December 2002 article "Controlling the Cracking" contained inaccurate technical information. We have asked expert Dennis Graber, Director of Technical Publications for the National Concrete Masonry Association, to author an article for the March issue of Masonry magazine with the correct information. We apologize for these errors.