May 2020 Letter from Colorado Roofing Association President

By Jeff Johnston, CRA President.

CRA president shares about difficulties faced due to COVID-19 and ideas on how to strengthen membership requirements.

I am writing this today with a positive and optimistic attitude that our state, cities and counties will start to open slowly, but consistently through this month. 

We all need to be cautious, but my hope is that we won’t see any more peaks of COVID-19 in our state.  We all need to get on with our lives and get the economy roaring again.

Like many of you, we thought we had booked too much work two months ago and had fears about how we were going to schedule that much work.  Two months later, approximately 6 million dollars of that work has been delayed by 4-5 months or pushed to 2021.  So, as I am sure a lot of you are, we are scrambling to keep our crews busy through the summer.  As I said; I pray this will be behind all of us soon.

So on to roofing news.  The CRA Membership committee and the CRA Board of Directors have been working for some time now on strengthening our membership requirements.  We are committed to making sure that all of our members are following state and federal mandated rules when it comes to conducting ethical business practices.  The number one problem in our industry is businesses operating without workman’s comp coverage on every employee.  If you work with subcontractors, by law, they need to be covered by workman’s comp. 

The CRA is currently doing an audit to check on the types of classifications and the number of employees being reported on your workman’s comp schedule.  Remember, if you're only reporting office staff and your employees are all subcontracted, those independent subcontractors need to have their own workman’s comp policy and a schedule showing the proper classification of their workers and showing they paid on each of their employees.  This is a huge issue.  If a company is bidding against someone that has all of their employees that are all covered by their workman’s comp policy, taking taxes out and paying on their general liability policy against a company that has only subcontractors and no taxes, the labor expense gap between the two is a 35-40% difference.  CRA members are the best of the best and we can maintain this standard by all of our members following the requirements in our by-laws and ethics agreement.

I sincerely thank those of you who have already responded and encourage those of you who have not replied to get the audit information to the CRA office by the end of May.  We assure you that your information will remain confidential and is only being seen by association staff.  Individual member information WILL NOT be shared with the Board or Membership Committee members.  They will receive a compiled list stating that association staff has reviewed and verified that the minimum satisfactory payroll was met and that evidence was provided of coverage specifically written for the roofing and/or sheet metal workers' compensation classification.

In closing, last week was a sad week.  We lost one of our best members and a great leader of the CRA, Dan Zahtila.  Dan was a long term, involved member, past president of the association and recently our Lifetime Achievement recipient.  Our sincerest condolences go out to Dan’s family and friends.

God Bless Everyone.

Jeff Johnston

The Roofing Company
CRA President

Learn more about the CRA in their RoofersCoffeeShop® Directory.