February 2025 Vol. 80 No. 2
Features
PCCA enters 2025 with full agenda
By Mike Ancell
(UI) — With the federal government in tremendous flux at the start of the year, leaders of the Power & Communication Contractors Association knew they had to hit the ground running in 2025. They knew that with President Trump returning to the White House and a new GOP-led Congress, our industry would be buoyed by pro-business policies and unshackled from the over-regulation and imposed social policies of the last four years.
But at the same time, PCCA members needed to educate lawmakers and federal agencies on the importance of the infrastructure programs that fund much of their work and provide vital services to rural America.
Following the November elections, PCCA identified the survival of the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program as the top priority of the association and its members. Several legislators who have traditionally been PCCA allies were outspoken about targeting the BEAD program as government waste, largely due to the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) provisions in the program and its extremely slow rollout by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
In response, PCCA began working on the BEAD Barrier Breakdown Agenda, focusing on reforming BEAD and helping change NTIA from a red-tape referee into a rapid deployment provider. PCCA's recommendations to NTIA are:
- Remove non-legislated requirements that currently make BEAD a vehicle for enacting social policy, rather than getting connected.
- Direct the NTIA to grant states waivers for non-legislated requirements, such as price control policies, and empower state broadband offices to focus exclusively on funding infrastructure construction.
- Reform or remove BEAD workforce requirements to ensure that funds facilitate reliable broadband infrastructure built by qualified workers, without workforce restrictions and mandates.
- Direct the NTIA to simplify or rescind the unnecessary nine-part "challenge step" from the application process when the geographic areas proposed for infrastructure correspond with the FCC maps for the unserved/underserved.
- Accelerate broadband deployment by removing duplicative federal permitting requirements, such as in right-of-ways, where infrastructure already exists.
The next step was to take these recommendations to Capitol Hill during PCCA's Annual Washington Fly-in, Jan. 28-30. PCCA members met with senators, representatives and their staffs, including members of the Senate Broadband Caucus, the Rural Broadband Caucus, the Energy & Commerce Committee and the House Budget Committee. They also met with FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez and Christopher McLean from the RUS Electric Program.
During these meetings, members discussed the BEAD program, permitting reform, labor policy, tax policy and PHMSA reauthorization, focusing on including damage prevention provisions that benefit the safety of construction workers and the general public.
"Our job over the next few days is to make sure our Congress and the federal agencies understand how important our industry is to the U.S. economy and to the voters who elected them,” PCCA President & CEO Tim Wagner told members at the fly-in. “We need to build the nation’s infrastructure without excessive government regulation and interference. We need to keep the infrastructure portions of the IIJA and do away with the cumbersome regulations and frivolous DEI provisions in the programs."
Besides the fly-in, PCCA will hold two more of its annual meetings in 2025: the Annual Convention, March 7-12 at the Grand Hyatt Scottsdale Resort and the Mid-Year Meeting, Sept. 17-20 at the JW Marriott Savannah Plant Riverside District.
At the convention in March, the association welcomes its 2025-26 officers: Chairman Rob Pribyl, MP Nexlevel; Chairman-Elect Craig Amerine, Amerine Utilities Construction; 1st Vice Chairman Heath Sellenriek, Sellenriek Construction; 2nd Vice Chairman Chase Lapcinski, Push, Inc.; Treasurer John Audi, Mears Group; and Secretary Garrett Akin, Brooks Construction Co.
Constant search for workers
As the construction industry continues to seek workers, PCCA continued expanding its workforce development efforts in 2024. In July, PCCA announced a partnership with the Learning Alliance Corporation (LAC) to aid PCCA members in recruiting and retaining a much-needed workforce. LAC recruits and trains workers for the industry, focusing particularly on veterans and minorities. At the Mid-Year Meeting in July, LAC CEO Cesar Ruiz explained how he prepares candidates for careers in utility construction:
"How can we get you a veteran that's transitioning out that might have gone in when he or she was 18, coming out in 22, 23 after one term? How do we teach them about careers in telecom, and then how do we bridge them so that you receive them? We house them, we feed them, we basically put them in boot camp. It's four to five weeks. It's 12 hours a day, six days a week. It's rigorous. It's tough. But the result is an individual that's willing and able to work in your industry, which is 99 percent of the impediments that most of you are experiencing."
In 2024, PCCA also partnered with the Fiber Broadband Association to fund a national workforce study, Broadband Market Workforce Needs. Conducted by Continuum Capital, the study found that the unprecedented injection of federal and state funding into the broadband market is a disruptive force requiring an extraordinary volume of engineering and construction activity that the market is not prepared to support and will result in broadband deployment delays. The study includes a state-by-state breakdown of broadband funding, workforce numbers, and wage rates.
"We went into the study with the hypothesis that this additional, or special, funding was going to be like a rising tide and would raise all boats, meaning that all broadband entities would get access to some portion of it," Continuum Capital's Mark Bridgers said. "It would be equally dispersed within the state, within the regions, within the country, and so forth.
“Based on this research, we concluded that it's not going to happen. What is going to occur is that this money will be accrued by the organizations that are the most aggressive in the pursuit of it."
On the workforce development front, PCCA also partners with technical schools and community colleges to create utility construction programs, participates in Department of Labor apprenticeship programs, provides scholarships for students looking to work in the construction industry, produces and shares videos promoting careers in utility construction, and works with state broadband offices. PCCA members have beefed up their recruiting staffs and greatly broadened their recruiting and retention strategies. Check out PCCA's Careers page.
About the author: Mike Ancell is the editor of the PCCA Journal and vice president of Innovative Association Solutions, LLC
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