The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Good afternoon. Welcome to PCI's webinar series, PCI President Member Update. My name is Nicole Clow, Marketing Manager at PCI, and I'll be your moderator for this session. Before I turn the controls over to your presenter for today, I have a few introductory items to note. The handout for this webinar can be found in the handout section of your webinar toolpane. If you cannot download the handout, please email PCI Marketing at marketing at pci.org, as shown on your screen. Please note that all attending lines are muted. The GoToWebinar toolbox has an area for you to raise your hand. If you raise your hand, you will receive a private chat message from me. If you have a question, please type it into the questions pane, where I'll be keeping track of them to read during the Q&A period. This webinar is non-CEU, and today's presentation will be recorded and uploaded to PCI's member resources at pci.org. Our presenter for today is Bob Risser, President and CEO of the Precast PreStress Concrete Institute. I will now hand the controls over so we can begin our presentation. Well, good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for this update of PCI activities. I certainly was glad to see many, many of our members at our recent convention in Indianapolis. Let me get started by referencing our 2024 PCI annual report that is now available on the PCI website. This is a wonderful snapshot of just how many activities PCI had going in 2024, and I hope you take the opportunity to download it and take a look at the many, many programs that we have going here at PCI. Before I get into some of the updates, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the newest members of our PCI staff who have come on board in the last couple of months. First is Amy Trigostat. As our new Vice President of Technical Services, Amy comes to us with many years of experience in the concrete industry, most recently as Vice President of Engineering for the Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute. Also new to the staff is Thomas Ketron. Thomas came on board in November as our new Director of Sustainability. There's a lot of programs going on in that particular area, and we'll get to that in a little bit, but we wanted to welcome Thomas. Thomas has been in the industry well over 20 years and has been very active in PCI going back to the first development of a Sustainability Committee in the 2000s. Our newest member is Natalie Martin. Natalie joined us just a few weeks ago as Director of Membership and Business Development. Natalie's a veteran of the industry and has been very involved with PCI in member companies, and we're excited to have her join the PCI staff. And then lastly, last fall, Leah James joined our staff as our Marketing Coordinator, and we welcome her to the PCI family as well. I mentioned the PCI Convention. We had an extraordinarily successful event a couple of weeks ago in Indianapolis. Again, was glad to see so many members there. We had well over 1,000 registrants, up about 2% from last year. And the precast show set a record attendance of just under 5,500, so it was a really, really exciting program. We went through a lot of things, gave out a lot of awards, and I'd just like to take a minute to recognize a few of those. As we usually do at our convention, we recognize the next group of PCI Fellows at the awards and membership luncheon. So congratulations to Sam Abadie, Bo Kuzner, Gary Lentz, Mark McKenney, Nancy Peterson, Bruce Russell, and Roxy Tagasada. We also honored Jim Sorensen with ENCON United as this year's winner of the Mario J. Bertolini Leadership and Innovation Award. And lastly, and most decidedly, deservedly, PCI bestowed its Medal of Honor on a long-time member and very involved member, Greg Force, with Tyndall. So congratulations to all those award winners, and I just wanted to recognize them for all their contributions to PCI. Along those lines, this next year's round of nomination deadlines is on the screen in front of you. So the Fellows, the Bertolini Award, and the Medal of Honor all open for nominations on April 1st and will close on August 1st. These will be decided by the Board of Directors at their meeting in the fall at committee days and be presented at the convention next year in Kansas City. We also have some technical awards whose nominations are open as we speak, and you can find them on the website. You can see the addresses there. The Norm Scott Professional Engineering Award and the Ernie J. Speyer Young Professional Engineer Award. So both of these are currently open for nominations, and they are due by May 1st. So let's talk a little bit about sustainability and the many activities and conversations that we had around this subject at the convention with the committees and at the Board of Directors. First of all, many of you know that we were notified that we were selected for an EPA grant together with our friends at NPCA and the American Concrete Pipe Association. It's just under $10 million, and this program is going to help us develop another product category rule, PCR, a new tool for calculating EPDs that are specific to precast and to help our members develop EPDs as their customers are demanding. This project has not been awarded. This grant has not been awarded, and it is currently formally on a 90-day hold pattern with the new administration. So it's important to note we're in a waiting period in terms of this grant. Meanwhile, the objectives of the Sustainability Committee to update our industry-wide EPD will be concluded here in the next couple of months. And I'm happy to report that we had a little bit of a development that we weren't expecting as we were updating this industry-wide EPD. And you can see from this map that based on the distribution and the types of products that the members submitted for this industry-wide EPD, we're very proud to announce that we're going to be able to have regional EPDs, which will be much more useful to our members in the marketplace. Now, in order to do this, we are going to have to combine the plants. Most of them fall along the lines of our PCI regions. And by combining the PCI West plants with those in Oregon and Washington, and then on the East Coast between PCI Mid-Atlantic and PCI Northeast, and then combining the Gulf South with Georgia Carolinas, we will be able to have regional EPDs in each of those areas. So that's a really big benefit. Expect to see those being published here probably by April. So some of our sustainability goals, and this goes to the EPA grant. We develop a new, more robust product category rule for precast concrete that are specific to precast. A lot of what we've done before is more on ReadyMix. We want to get a better EPD generator tool and then provide training to our members in how to develop those EPDs when their customers are asking for them. Now, all four of these, market engagement and focus groups, were included in the application for the EPA grant. There was quite a bit of discussion around this at the meeting and at the board of directors meeting. And at this time, the board has instructed us to move forward with developing a new PCR, regardless of what the outcome is for the EPA grant. So we are going to be proceeding with those tools. We've set that up for procurement and along the guidelines that the EPA directed so that if we do finally get the grant awarded, we've got a very, very good chance of getting reimbursed for these activities. But the board felt that the urgency in the marketplace for doing this was too strong to wait until the administration decides what to do with the EPA funding. So again, part of that plan is to eventually develop an EPD tool that's built specifically for precast and it's as easy to use as possible. One of the issues that we're facing with the tool is that a lot of the tools were simply designed for ready mix concrete and not the same as our precast manufacturing facility. So we're looking for something that's going to do that. And it's also going to go cradle to grave, not just cradle to gate. This allows us to take into account some of the natural benefits of precast concrete. So the new PCR will take a whole life cycle view as opposed to just cradle to gate. If you're interested in any of these topics, I encourage you to consider joining the number of committees that we have under our sustainability committee. You can see on the right hand side, architectural advisory group. That's a group of architects who are fans of precast. And they're helping guide us in terms of messaging and meeting the needs of the marketplace. You can see there's a producer task group, cement task group, and an insulation task group. So I encourage you, if you're interested, to contact PCI staff and get involved with these committees. So again, this is what's next. We're going to update the PCR. We've put in a placeholder. We are working with our other industry partners to see about their interest in participating. Moving forward, especially in the event we do not get the EPA grant, and we budgeted approximately $150,000 for next year's budget to accomplish that PCR. It's going to take about 18 months. And then after we've got that PCR, we will be developing that precast specific EPD generator tool. So you can see here a timeline on the sustainability efforts. We have the regional average EPDs will be completed by April. Our PCR update, we're set to put out an RFP here by the end of February. We hope to have selection in March and target completion in the fourth quarter of 2026. It's going to take about 18 months to do that. We're also happy to announce at the convention, we had our first ever WAP precast user group meeting. We will be convening that PCI or WAP user group monthly, kicking off February 26 on a Zoom meeting. So all producers who are using the WAP tool to generate EPDs are welcome to participate in the user group. WAP staff is there to help answer questions and deliver training. And the users can also interact with each other on how they're accomplishing their goals. So what you can see here, the timeline, the PCR update is the green in the middle, and we're looking for completion of that in the fall of 2026. There'll be some overlap period where we develop the new tool, and then we'll be into having our members generate EPDs with the new tool into 2027. Another topic of great celebration at the convention was the completion of the ACI PCI Code 319-2025. This went up on the ACI website the second week of January. That met the deadline for us being able to submit the 319 code to the IBC as a proposed code change for reference in the 2027 building code. This was a decades-long vision and endeavor, going all the way back to before PCI's actual beginnings in the 1950s, was the vision of a precast building code. It was a long road. This was the very first document, pre-stressed concrete building code requirements back in 1959. Morphed into the design handbook in 1971, and then we had PCI standard design practice that was referenced in ACI 318-14. We then became a standard developer organization in 2014 and started developing our own standards. Just a little bit of history, the very first chapter on pre-stressed concrete was included way back in the 318-1963 version. You could see some of the highlighted titans of the industry in Irwin Spire and Ross Bryan and T.Y. Lynn and A.H. Gustafaro, who were original members of that 318 representing pre-stressed concrete. So, due to a number of pressures, a decision was made back in 2018 when the board adopted our strategic plan, that our strategic goal was to develop a building code for precast structural concrete. There were a number of reasons behind it. The code saying that we can't use things in the handbook because they're not in mandatory language. We didn't have much expertise on precast concrete on 318. So, when the decision was made to move forward, the committee identified 60 different items that were in the handbook that needed to get turned into mandatory language, and then eventually put into 319 and referenced in the building code. So, this took a lot of back and forth between our design standards committee, our TAC, the new ACI PCI 319 committee that was formed, and all of this came together last fall in the completion of the first 319 version. These are some of the topics that are included in the first 319.25 document. I won't read them all, but these are all things that were currently not in the building code that came directly out of information in our design handbook. None of this would have been possible without some really dedicated staff and members. So, I want to particularly thank the 319 chair, Andrea Shocker. Harry Gleisch with Betramont was the vice chair. Trey Hamilton and Andrea were both ACI staff people. On our side for PCI, Edith Gallendorm was our leader in all of this on our staff. I want to thank her and Ned Cleland and all the folks on the screen here who helped make this historic document possible. So, thanks to all of them for their hard work. Now, the point is that we're not done. We're actually just getting started. So, with that completion, this design standard committee is already getting to work on openings through webs and ledges and steel hangers and the rest of these items for the next version of ACI PCI 319 that will come out. So, this is part of a series of codes that ACI is putting out, but ACI 319 is now going to be referenced in the IBC. So, a lot of other technical work that's been going on this last year. So, just really quickly, I want to walk through some of these codes or standards that we've published. In 2023, we put out the fire resistance. That is currently now referenced in the IBC. Last year, we put out the specification for glass fiber reinforced concrete panels. Also in 2024 is a new standard for precast pre-stressed concrete piles. That is scheduled to be referenced not only in the IBC, but also in by AASHTO later this spring. And then lastly, last year, put out the specification for the design of precast concrete insulated wall panels. We are also going to be putting that in as a code change to be referenced in the IBC code at the hearings coming up this spring. So a very, very busy year for the technical side of PCI and TAC, and thanks to all the members that helped make these documents possible. I just quickly on the bridge side, wanted to give you an update from the Committee on Bridges and Track. A very successful year. You can see that we've had more than 36 episodes of the bridge design manual in 2024, and we're already off to 116 here in January. So folks are really referencing that, and we're very proud of that. We've also got 32 e-learning modules on transportation topics, almost 1,600 starts and over 1,000 completions of those e-learning modules. So some more information on our education coming up here shortly, but just wanted to give a shout out to our friends on track and the Committee on Bridges for their accomplishments last year. Now switching gears very, very much. Just wanted to take a minute to talk about government affairs. We have recently gone in with NPCA and hired a lobbying firm in Washington, DC. You may remember from some of these updates last year that in the last Congress, Congressman Lloyd Smucker from Pennsylvania introduced a special new visa, or a temporary visa for non-agricultural workers, specifically construction. We've been working very closely with the representative's office, and I am also part of a group called the Construction Leadership Council, which is made up of about a dozen different organizations, including the Associated Building Contractors. We are coordinating with this because workforce is all of our members number one priority. So stay tuned for this. He's scheduled to be reintroducing this bill in March. We also conducted some polling on behalf of Congressman Smucker to see the sentiment. And I won't go into all the details, but the overwhelming support, even with people who are very secure at the border, that the border can be secured, but we need workers in the construction space. And so a lot of support, both among Democrats and Republicans for this type of temporary visa. So stay tuned for information on that as this year unfolds in Congress. Just wanted to remind everybody of our Workforce Development Committee, and in particular, some of these resources that are available to our members on the wellness side. We're really targeting this to try to address in our small way the high suicide rate in the construction industry. Switching gears to growing the markets. Our other strategic goal in our strategic plan is to increase our relative market share. And so I'd just like to take a few more, little while to talk about all the incredible things we have going on in this particular space. First and foremost, our convention included the presentation of the 2025 Design Awards. We had 73 submissions, 63 in the buildings category, 10 in transportation, and we had 20 producers represented among the winners. And we had a great time presenting these at the convention. But the Design Awards never sleeps, so I just wanna use this opportunity to let members know that the submission site for the 2026 Design Awards opens on April 1st, and nominations will close on July 8th. Judging will take place in the fall, and they'll be submitted, they'll be presented next year at the convention in Kansas City. We try to give a lot of earned media and publicity to the Design Awards. So consider submitting a nomination or multiple nominations. So this is just some of the coverage that we give to the Design Award winners. We're also happy to announce a new category in the Design Awards, a Structural Innovation Award that'll recognize outstanding structural achievements. This allows us to recognize engineering achievements of our members on some of these projects without necessarily being high-end architectural. I'll remind everyone of the vast amount of marketing resources that are available through PCI on our website, whether it's logos and our survey, update, webinar, construction, forecast, all sorts of tools that members can use in their marketing efforts. As always, we continue to work on earned media opportunities. This is where we can get advertising, not advertising, but we can get articles and other recognitions of our members' projects in various forms of media, both digital and traditional. So this is an example. The UC Davis Health Austin Parking Facility was picked up by several magazines along with these other examples, as you can see here on the slide. And this is just sort of a sample of just this month alone, all of the earned media that's picked up from our Design Awards and other project recognitions. So if your company and your projects are getting any media coverage in the local newspapers or television stations, please contact PCI. Send it to marketing at pci.org. We keep a complete library of all the coverage of precast and pre-stress projects on our website. So let us help you get the word out about those recognitions. Just a little update on Ascent, our magazine that's geared toward the architectural community. You can see we're up to 16,000 print subscriptions and over 33,000 digital readership numbers. This is a, we have a Ascent marketing toolkit for members to use on social media. So look for those tools on the website as well. Future issues of Ascent, we're gonna talk about sustainable benefits for precast in the winter issue. The spring issue always showcases the Design Awards. This summer, we'll be concentrating on precast builds communities with theaters, schools, and recreation projects. And then the fall issue is set to focus on mid and high-rise precast projects. So be sure to take a look at that. We also continue to maintain our How Precast Builds website for external stakeholders. It's focused on the areas of a customer's interests and ads and media direct people to this particular website. Particularly timely is the whole subject of resilience. And for that, we continue to have our Precast Protects Life campaign. Last year, we had an entire issue of Ascent that's devoted strictly to resilient precast projects. And this is a microsite that you can use and point your customers to as well. So just a little update on our Marketing Committee for Sustainability. We've updated the PCI Sustainability page. We're planning a webinar series here in 2025 and a whole slew of tools and programs that our members can use in trying to work on PCI or precast image in the marketplace in the area of sustainability. We're also proud to announce that we are on a program of the Building Enclosure Consultants International in March, and we're happy to be partnering with our Mountain States Chapter Executive Director, Jim Schneider, who will be presenting on Precast Concrete Enclosure Systems. So look forward to that. All of these events are on the PCI website under the events. I remind, even though it's not till next fall, all of our members, encourage them to participate in PCI Precast Days by celebrating with some open houses and showcasing what our plants do with education sessions or job fairs. We will be having some more tool kits for members to use for social and digital media. They'll be coming out later this spring. So we hope everyone will participate in Precast Days. We also continue to have our regular series of webinars. We've got a series on workforce development. You can see from the slide here, upcoming ones on sustainability, the resilience in Precast Protects Life category. We're excited to have two new series on thin brick precast, architectural precast coming up. And then you can see data centers, parking structures, and on UHPC and transportation. We're also planning webinars around the upcoming next edition of the design handbook and ACI PCI 319 standard specification on insulated wall panels. So we've got a busy year planned ahead in our webinar series. We also continue to offer a tremendous amount of education resources. These are really have grown over the last several years. You can see we've got our e-learning, on-demand training. Our PCI Academy is a multi-week schools and monthly webinars that can give professionals PDHs for their licenses, both architects and engineers. We continue to partner with PCI Foundation on the professor's conference. It's gonna be held in May in Austin, Texas. We're very close to completing 13 weeks of teaching materials that professors can use to teach precast and pre-stress concrete for an entire semester. We're excited that the next, well, it's currently underway, our basic pre-stress concrete design in the online academy. We continue to have the big beam competition and continue to try to grow interest in the pre-stress mini beam in partnership with ASCE. The mini beam program is, our goal there is to have it mimic the steel bridge competition that ASCE has every year. And then we're really excited about our brand new design precast competition. And I'll talk about a little bit more. All those are coming up this year. So just a acknowledgement, this year's overall winner of the big beam contest was North Carolina State University. Congratulations to that team. We honored them at the member and award luncheon at the convention just a few weeks ago. The winner of the best report and the best video went to the team from Lehigh University. So congratulations to them as well. As I said, this year we had a pilot or should say last year, we had a pilot program, the first ever architectural student competition instead of engineering compliment the big beam. We are excited to get 16 entries. We had with 42 students participating and we had three winning teams. We are looking to grow this and repeat it here. These students, the winning teams made presentations to the student education committee and to the architectural precast committee at the convention a few weeks ago in Indianapolis. So really excited about this new competition for architectural students to compliment our long big beam contest with engineering students. So congratulations to these three teams all from the University of Maryland who won the inaugural architectural competition here at PCI. Other education awards, we're very happy that John Myers was acknowledged as our PCI educator of the year. And Wael Zatar was the PCI distinguished educator of the year also honored at the awards luncheon at the convention. We also continued to have our student job fair at the convention. It was very well attended. We had over 130 students and all attend the convention. And the time I was on the job fair, it seemed like a lot of them were there. Thanks for the members on the screen who participated. We got lots of feedback. So if you're interested next year, contact PCI staff if you're interested in having a tabletop for your company at the student job fair next year in Kansas City. Also just keeping track, we have our student handbook. Many longtime industry members know that this was something sought after, especially by our chapters to make some version of the handbook for free to students. So you can see since we launched it, we have 632 versions of the handbook, almost all by students. So that continues to be a great program. We also updated last year the pre-stressed in a box teaching materials. And you can see we had 68 downloads of that as well. And again, our education center continues to be very popular with professionals. We've added all sorts of new subjects that we've talked about, but you can just see here the growth. This is the total courses started by year. So we had another increase in 2024 over 23 with over 3,300 people completing courses over almost 5,500 beginning courses on our website. So design professionals are coming to PCI for information and for credits for their licenses. We also keep track of the completed courses by member type. So you can see the incredible growth over the last several years, representing thousands of professionals who are coming to our site for information about precast. If all of these activities are of any interest to you, I'll use this opportunity to make a plug for our marketing council and our education activity council. Love to have you involved on those councils and on the numerous subcommittees that we have underneath those councils. So I encourage you to get involved. Upcoming later this fall is the tour of the productivity tour. It's gonna be in Austin, Texas, May 6th to 8th. We'll be visiting several different plants. You can see Gates Architectural Plant and their structural plant, Texas Concrete Products, Heldenfels, NAPCO, and Tyndall's Plant in Central Texas. So that registration is currently open on our website, pci.org slash the tour. So I encourage you to get your production folks signed up. I'm looking forward to a great event in Austin in May. So that's just a little bit of a snapshot. Again, I encourage you to download the 2024 annual report that goes into even more detail about what you've got going on at your institute. We will be back in Chicago in the fall for committee days. So we hope that you'll join us there and please consider signing up for the return of Concrete Chefs benefiting the foundation. With that, I'd be more than happy to take any questions. I know that's a lot of information, but we really do have quite a bit going on at PCI. Wonderful. Thank you, Bob, for a great and informative presentation. It doesn't look like any questions have come through currently. So in the meantime, if anyone does have any further questions about today's webinar, please email marketing at pci.org with the subject header presidents update webinar. And then I'll get those questions over to Bob. So thank you all again for joining us for today's webinar. Have a great day and please stay safe.

PCI convention

sustainability initiatives

Environmental Product Declarations

ACI PCI Code 319-2025

educational resources

market engagement

government affairs