On June 7, the day before the opening of the World of Concrete trade show, the American Concrete Pumping Association hosted its first-ever Train the Trainer workshop. Train the Trainer workshops are part of ACPA’s improved Operator Safety Training and Certification Program, which launched in 2020. Referred to as “Certification 2020,” the program expands on its mandatory safety training requirement for certification and adds greater integrity to the certification testing process.
Similar to sales tax, highway federal excise taxes (FET) are paid when purchases are made for specific goods, such as diesel fuel and truck chassis. There are also excise taxes on certain activities, such as on highway usage by trucks. Revenues collected from FET are designated to help support the Highway Trust Fund, which finances most federal government spending for highways and mass transit.
The Build with Strength Coalition, along with partners American Concrete Pumping Association (ACPA) and Insulating Concrete Forms Manufacturing Association (ICFMA), has begun work on a first-of-its-kind project for Habitat for Humanity.
The project consists of nine, Net Zero Ready and insulated concrete form duplexes in Woodland Park, Colorado, and should be completed in 2022. The duplexes, which include 18 homes for families, were designed by Architectural Workshop and engineered by Innovative Engineering to achieve Energy Star and LEED Silver certification.
Here at NBIS, we are constantly faced with questions from insured partners regarding their driver training programs. We field questions from everything related to frequency of training to types of driver training. Part of the reason for the variance in driver training approaches is a lack of clarity from regulatory bodies like the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). Driver training rules and regulations offer only that training should be conducted and documented.
As of February 2021, 12 states have legalized recreational marijuana, and 22 more states have legalized marijuana for medicinal use. For employers, this new age of legalization poses two issues: first, a complex system of contradictory local, state and federal laws to navigate; and second, an increase in employee usage. In the concrete pumping industry, where many employees work in safety-sensitive, federally-regulated positions, marijuana usage is a potential threat to both legality and safety.
