Handbook's Renovations
Spark Industry Concerns

A major expansion of the construction industry's specifications handbook is under way, and with it a debate about how the changes will affect the industry.

The Construction Specifications Institute, an 18,000-member technical society in Arlington, Va., that publishes a coding system called MasterFormat in conjunction with Construction Specifications Canada, last month released a draft of the biggest revision of the document in its 40 years. The institute plans to complete the final draft of MasterFormat in June, and the major shifts in the construction industry would take place in 2004, said Dennis Hall, a Charlotte, N.C., architect and chairman of the expansion team.

MasterFormat is a crucial system that makes sense and gives structure and consistency to the complicated process of building all types of structures. Architects, builders and contractors use it to organize the drawing up of building plans. It is often used in other parts of the building process as well, such as coordinating bidding on contracts and writing insurance policies.

The MasterFormat system divides construction into categories, like masonry and site construction, with subsets organized by numbers -- a sort of Dewey decimal system for construction specifications. If contractors need to know which type of ceiling fans should be used in a building plan, for instance, they look under air distribution in the mechanical division.

The Construction Specifications Institute typically revises MasterFormat about every seven years, but the latest version being developed contains the most sweeping changes ever, in part because of recent developments in computer networks and telecommunications. The draft makes room for new divisions in communications and in "life safety," which includes fire, security and electrical construction, and it expands MasterFormat to cover civil engineering projects like dams, tunnels and sewers.

Cost Effects

The expansion's proponents say the new MasterFormat will make for better buildings. They say designing environmental, communications, computer and security systems into a project before it is built will help prevent cost overruns during construction and expensive retrofits afterward.

"This will impact the industry significantly," said Tony Keane, the institute's executive director. "In the long run, I think, money will be saved."

While it is difficult to put a dollar mark on any potential savings, doing anything to improve efficiency in an industry with revenues of more than $800 billion a year will be significant, Mr. Keane said.

The expansion's primary impact will be in the better integration of communications and safety systems into buildings, said Mr. Hall, the leader of the expansion team. Building-safety issues have been a top priority since last year's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, which prompted the task force to emphasize the integration of safety features in a building from the ground up. Such features are commonly installed after a building is put up.

"It makes it much less expensive to put them in the design of the building than as an afterthought," Mr. Keane said.

Protests Are Heard

The newest changes aren't coming without controversy, though. Some unions and trade associations have protested the expansion, saying it will complicate how they do business and even cause them to lose contracts.

The document has separated the construction process into 16 divisions since its inception, but the expansion will more than double that number, and MasterFormat's users will have to adjust to some significant differences. For instance, electrical power, communications and life safety systems are all under the electrical division of the current MasterFormat. The expanded version would put them in three separate divisions.

"Our basic objection to the revisions is that we think these changes are complicated, unnecessary and will disrupt the construction process," said Brooke Stauffer, an executive director of the National Electrical Contractors Association. With newly separated divisions, the paperwork involved in the bidding process could increase and there could be confusion as the industry adjusts to the new standards, Mr. Stauffer said. "The potential for a lot of costly disruption exists," he added.

Mr. Hall acknowledged the changes will "be a little bit of trouble for the first short period of time," but said they will become as standard as the current MasterFormat without causing much turmoil.

Telecommunications groups have been lobbying for years to take communications out of the electrical division, to incorporate the enormous changes in their industry over the past two decades. But these groups are also "commercially motivated" to have a more visible role in MasterFormat, Mr. Stauffer said.

Taking communications out of the electrical division means builders could overlook electrical contractors for that type of work, and many in the field think electrical contractors will lose customers. Electrical contractors weren't included on the task force and had no say in the expansion, Mr. Stauffer said.

Thomas Rauscher, president of telecom consulting group Archi-Technology LLC, plays down those concerns. "The electrical guys, if they're good at it, are going to win" the communications contracts, he said.

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