ASA’s advocacy efforts are set to take off in a new direction. We are expanding our ability to impact government regulations and their impact on our industry and your business. Seeing the challenges continually placed on our manufacturers and small businesses within our industry and beyond, ASA’s leadership has approved plans for ASAto bring our advocacy programs beyond the Washington Beltway and engage in Sacramento, Calif.
As you know, California and the regulations that come out of the state capital dramatically impact the way you do business. In fact, I’m sure you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that many of the distributors in California have employees spending an inordinate amount of time monitoring which products no longer meet the ever-changing laws passed each year. The time that could be better spent growing a business, instead is spent avoiding fines and penalties. And as Hirsch Pipe & Supply’s Bill Glockner said in the 2015 Supply House Times Distributor Roundtable: “Being based in California, it seems like we’ve had a permanent obsolescence team. Every year there is some new legislated issue that we have to manage around and some chunk of our inventory likely will become obsolete because of it. We are afraid to guess what is it going to be next? I feel like our legislators believe they know more about the materials needed in plumbing products than manufacturing experts or research scientists.”