SNARSCA / Southwest Gas 
Referral Program Explained

Special to The Construction Zone

"We have 340,000 work orders a year, and we just can’t keep up," said Bill Laub, Jr., of Southwest Gas, at the September SNARSCA meeting. Laub serves as a director for SNARSCA, and helped design the new referral program in which the gas company will refer customers requesting certain services to SNARSCA. The calls will go to an answering service, and the customer given the names of three SNARSCA member contractors to help with their service needs.

Laub drew a distinction between the new program and Southwest Gas’ long running "Energy Services Referral Program." That program was open to non-SNARSCA members while the new referral program is geared to members of the association.

With the valley growing as it is, Southwest Gas is shedding services in order to keep up with demand. Such work as furnace relights, furnace replacement and gaslight service will no longer be done by the utility.

Those calls will go to SNARSCA members.

Southwest Gas has 75 field technicians who will hand out a card with the SNARSCA referral telephone number when a customer inquires about services the gas company no longer performs. Laub said that Southwest Gas expects to hand out 35,000 of those cards, and that the utility will also inform customers about the referral program in their monthly gas bill.

"Thank you for partnering with us to those customer we can’t," Laub said.

Scott Meier, Custom Cooling & Heating, explained the new SNARSCA referral program in detail at the SNARSCA meeting. Meier worked with Kurt Faux, the association’s attorney, to draft a referral program that is fair, equitable and doesn’t expose the association to risk.

"This program is free to SNARSCA members, and we think it’s a benefit to SNARSCA members," Meier said.

The new program requires that contractors in the program name SNARSCA as an "additional insured" on their insurance policy. The contractor assumes the risk for the job, just as he does in his daily business.

The contractor must hold SNARSCA "Harmless" if something goes wrong on the job. Meier said this is no different for the contractor than currently, where SNARSCA has no responsibility for their behavior or actions on a job.

A program for dealing with consumer complaints about referred contractors was also made part of the program. The SNARSCA board has discretion to remove any contractor from the list who receives complaints about his work.

For more information about the SNARSCA referral program, please call (702) 648-8486

Vo-Tech Ride-Along Program Underway

Special to The Construction Zone

Part of answering the question of who will be the service technicians of the future is programs that introduce today’s youth to the trades.

Ed Bless, owner of Carl’s Air Conditioning and SNARSCA director, reported that the association’s "Ride-Along" program through Vo-Tech High School is gearing up for another year of putting high school students in the field.

Again the problem with the program is simply not enough students interested in the service industry to meet the demand.

"We have 22 SNARSCA members signed up and 11 seniors in the program," Bless said. "The kids will have uniforms and notebooks this year and we’re looking to start a paid internship."

The association and Vo-Tech are asking participating contractors to pay the students a competitive wage in the hope of attracting and keeping high school seniors in the program.

"We figure they can go to Burger King and get a job for $6, $7 bucks an hour," Bless said. "If we pay them for their work, we have a better chance of getting more kids in the program."

The students will be available for three days a week, and want to get as much as 25 hours in during that time.

SNARSCA president Mary Dille said that part of the problem was the way kids have been treated by contractors in the past. "These kids have lost their enthusiasm because contractors have put them in the yard cleaning pipe or made them delivery boys instead of sending them out with a tech and training them in the skills they need," she said.

Tools Anyone?

Ed Bless, SNARSCA director, said that if a SNARSCA member hires a high school student and the student needs tools in which to work, that area suppliers such as Johnstone Supply are offering significant discounts to help defray the cost to the contractor.

From The Construction Zone: October 2000

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