CSI Charlotte
Our Chapter meets regularly on the 3rd Monday of the month from January through December - with the exception of the summer months of June and July. Our meetings are held at The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery, located at 4150 Yancey Road, in Charlotte.
Check out our Upcoming Events page, where we have the information for our upcoming Chapter Meetings, as well as a link to RSVP to meetings. Please RSVP by 5:00pm the Wednesday prior to our meeting, so that we can plan accordingly. We look forward to seeing you at our next meeting!
In addition to our regular chapter meetings, our chapter hosts construction site tours and production plant tours. Our chapter also hosts several special events throughout the year, including Procrastinator's Day in December and our Annual CSI Golf Tournament in the spring.
History of the CSI Charlotte Chapter
Editor's Note: The information below came from an article contributed by Joel Stegall, one of our Charter Members, regarding the creation and establishment of the CSI Charlotte Chapter. The article has been edited slightly for the context of this website. To read the original article, please click on the button below. We would like to thank Joel for his contribution of our chapter's history.
The Construction Specifications Institute was founded in Washington, DC and incorporated in Maryland in 1948.
Joel Stegall joined CSI in 1953, but was a lone member in Charlotte for 3 or 4 years. Woody Atkins transferred from Virginia to Charlotte as a manufacturer’s representative, and found out that Joel was a CSI member. He was aware of CSI and its goals, and so he joined and together we got several people interested in becoming members and forming a chapter.
Woody, Walter Hoover and Joel went to Cleveland, Ohio for the second national convention in early summer of 1958. After attending a couple of meetings there, they were able to get more people interested, so work began on organizing a local chapter.
At the time, there were 25 chapters in the Institute. We were chartered by the Institute on July 6, 1958 with 29 members. The charter was presented on October 24, 1958 at the Elks Club on South Tryon Street by Willard H. Barrows, Vice President of the Institute. Barrows, incidentally, was the specifications writer for the United Nations Building.
Some of the national committees in the early days were: Specification Methods, Technical (including Bibliography; Specification Nomenclature; and Tests, Codes and Standards), and Reference Workmanship Specifications.
One of the first chapter programs was a “gripe” session, where several major and local contractors were invited to come in and tell us what they saw wrong with our specs. Most of those making presentations were estimators and project managers. It turned out to be one of the best programs to be presented in order to get people interested, and to let other parties of the construction team know that the chapter members were serious. All of the architects, engineers, and specification writers attending got some real “eye-openers”. After that, we started getting better cooperation from all parties of the construction team.
The construction team has been identified with a 3-legged stool – one of the most stable structures. It takes the owner as one leg; the designer (architects and engineers) as the second leg; and the contractor (the builder – including subcontractors, suppliers, tradesmen, and all the rest) as the third leg, all working together to make a successful project.