Meeting Format

The forums are arranged typically around a one-day meeting schedule (8:30 AM – 3:00 PM) that allows most participants to travel to the meeting and return home within the meeting day.
Morning session:
An open session with industry participants is held in the morning. Typically, 4-5 presentations are scheduled to inform about current issues relevant for the trenchless technology community, new developments, methods and technologies on the market, etc. Often presented are details and lessons learnt from completed case studies. Participants frequently prefer to discuss industry-wide and non-product specific issues.
Afternoon session:
After lunch, the discussions are closed to outside participation and the municipalities are free to exchange candid assessments of their experiences with trenchless technologies, contracting practices, program impacts, etc. The topics for discussion are chosen by the municipal members and follow up information is often exchanged after the meeting. In some recent forums, the municipal members have chosen a specific focus for the meeting and invited industry speakers to present their products or expertise on the chosen topics.
Who May Attend?
Both municipal and non-municipal participants are welcome but non-municipal participants must leave after the lunch. Non-municipal participants are invited on a space-available basis.
Who May Present?
Consultants, manufacturers, public works, etc interested in promoting trenchless technology based on accurate and non-biased information, who have knowledge and experience with design issues, field application of trenchless methods, regulations, asset management, etc and would like to share them with the municipal participants. The TTC will screen the presentations before approving them to be shown at the forums. Set of rules and requirements from the presenters apply (ask the TTC for details).
Size of Forums
The municipal participation is targeted for a number of participants that will allow free discussion on issues rather than speaker and audience sessions. Usually about 40-50 people are attending, which also includes the presenters and the TTC representative(s).

There is a small cost to participate in the forum.

• Municipal participants : $45 (most forums)
• Non-municipal participants : $85
• Presentators : $500 (30 min slots)

The Municipal Users' Forum Program for trenchless technology was in initiated in 1996 as an effort to link municipalities and public works agencies together to share information on the application of trenchless technologies to underground utility installation and repair.
The rationale behind the creation of the forum was that most municipalities face many problems in assessing and using new technologies in general and trenchless technologies in particular:

• Undue reliance on manufacturer and supplier information can restrict competition unnecessarily and raise costs.
• To have each individual municipality and agency developing their own evaluation criteria for unfamiliar technologies and conducting their own tests is difficult, wasteful and time consuming for both public works groups and inventors of new processes alike.
• A balance must be struck between encouraging new technology improvements and allowing untested products or systems to be used on critical infrastructure elements.
• Municipalities have very few opportunities to share their experiences outside of a public forum.

The initial forum concept was based on a national forum membership program, collaboration by phone and email and an annual meeting of the members. However, the difficulty for public works engineers to gain approval for funds to travel and for forum membership made participation difficult despite the widespread interest. These difficulties prompted a change in direction for the program in late 1997. The focus of the forum interactions was changed to biannual meetings of regional forums facilitated by the Trenchless Technology Center with no cost to municipal participants. Special funding from several industry sponsors together with the funding provided by the center's Industry Advisory Board was used to allow the center to cover the travel costs of municipal participation in the forums. This concept has evolved to the current forum arrangements in which participants come almost exclusively from the local region and the forum fees are targeted to help offset most direct forum expenses.