About Us
CSI Charlotte Chapter
CSI Charlotte Chapter meets regularly throughout the year. The chapter typically hosts monthly events from January through December - except for the summer months of June and July. Education meetings are typically held on alternating third Mondays (every other month) from 11:30am - 1:00pm at various locations in the Charlotte area.
In addition to education meetings, the chapter also hosts special events throughout the year including an awards event, networking opportunities, an annual CSI Charlotte golf tournament, construction site tours and building product plant tours.
Check out our Calendar page to find information for our upcoming events, as well as registration links. We look forward to seeing you at an upcoming CSI Charlotte meeting or event!
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 to get
people interested, and to let other parties of the construction team know that
the chapter members were serious. All 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.