Even with gloomy news of client cutbacks, results of a new survey of 300 owners are giving construction managers some hope that more in-house project management roles would be outsourced. At the annual convention of the Construction Management Association of America in San Diego, some 1,000 attendees learned Oct. 4 that at least half of owners who responded to the study, done jointly by CMAA and industry management firm FMI, reduced internal staff in the last two years; 18% noted cutbacks of more than 20%. Nearly one-third of respondents to the survey, which CMAA says is "across a wide range

With its membership in recession mode, the Associated Builders and Contractors drew only about 1,100 attendees to its 60th anniversary convention in San Diego earlier this month. But many of them packed a last-day, early-morning session to hear claims the open-shop trade group was managing to stave off new pro-labor moves by the Obama Administration and push supportive candidates in this year’s congressional elections. The session was closed to nonmembers, but ABC legal counsel Maury Baskin, a Baltimore-based attorney, told ENR that, despite organized labor’s ramped-up attacks on open-shop construction, “the surprise is that we’ve held our own after the