April 6–9, 2025
Grand Rapids, MI
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: Friday, October 4, 2024
Questions? Email us at cfpquestions@apwa.org for further assistance.
Three easy steps to submitting your proposal:
- Read this page for information and instructions.
- Click the “Submit Proposal” button below.
- Complete the Call for Presentations form.
Interested in sharing your knowledge, experience, and vision for the future?
The APWA North American Snow Conference provides education and solutions for public works snowfighters and those who support them. This highly anticipated annual conference offers more than 40 education sessions, technical tours, and a variety of opportunities for collaboration and networking. And new in 2025, poster sessions!
The education program provides a dynamic forum for information exchange, problem-solving, and collaboration. Speakers are public works professionals, just like you, eager to help their colleagues manage winter/snow operations more successfully, take advantage of emerging technologies, understand and prepare for the challenges ahead, and provide better service to their communities.
What are we looking for?
We are looking for speakers with new perspectives, solid best practices and/or innovative twists to winter maintenance, workforce development, and fleet/operations. At Snow Conference, participants will have the ability to attend sessions from six tracks throughout the event. Within each track, there are presentations specific to that topic. Each year, we receive feedback on what attendees would like to learn more about, which we use to help choose session proposals that will be meaningful to our attendees.
Below is a list of requested topics for 2025.
Information Management for Winter Operations
- Emergency management of severe winter events.
- Winter weather plans and snow/ice control techniques for areas with infrequent winter storm events.
- Seven–10-day weather forecasting improvements and maintenance decisions.
- Community outreach/citizen interaction and innovative uses of technology including social media.
- How to define and identify who actually determines level of service in your agency.
- How you know it’s time to re-evaluate levels of service.
- Communication outreach/effective communication with agency leadership and elected officials
- Practices that minimize the environmental impacts of winter operations.
- Using winter operations to enhance road system resilience.
Innovative Solutions for Snow and Ice Control
- Use of electric vehicles and how it’s changing fleet management.
- Technology advancement, including AI, and the impact on winter operations.
- Trending technologies and expanded uses for current technologies: (GPS, AVL, RWIS, smart city technologies, mobile apps, asset management, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, etc.)
Leadership and Workforce Solutions
- Workforce development and succession planning.
- Innovation in workforce recruitment and retention.
- Developing and investing in staff.
- Preparing staff for leadership roles when extreme weather happens.
- Recognizing career transitions and cross-training between departments.
- Increasing staff during extreme weather.
- Innovative approaches to managing budget and staffing limitations with rising levels of service expectations.
Materials Application—Snow and Ice Control
- Deicing, liquids, blending, and the exploration of the materials used in snow and ice control.
- Anti-icing techniques and tips.
- Chemical usage and selection, the chemistry behind the materials, and how they perform in the field.
- Unique and innovative uses for liquids in winter operations.
Winter Fleet Operations and Equipment Management
- Multi-use vehicles—fleet vehicles serving outside winter operations.
- Snowfighting equipment.
- Winter fleet operations and vehicle preparation.
- Specification writing and ordering of fleet vehicles.
- Maintaining less used fleet vehicles.
- Winterproofing fleet vehicles for snowplowing operations.
- Establishing timely replacements of fleet assets.
Winter Maintenance Planning and Operations
- Strategies for plowing and disposal, right-of-way management.
- Snow and ice clearing/management around facilities, sidewalks, walkways, and other multimodal facilities.
- Best practices for winter maintenance planning and operations.
- Approaches to mixed precipitation challenges.
See where these topic areas fall in terms of the “track” you can select for your proposal.
Education Session Formats
Please review the options below for the type and length of format you may select. APWA offers five different formats to ensure dynamic education sessions. APWA reserves the right to select sessions for formats other than the one selected during proposal submission.
- Education Session: 50 minutes
- Education Session: 75 minutes
- Education Session: 20 minutes
- NEW in 2025: Poster Presentation: posters providing information about your research, program, case study, or innovative practice will be displayed. Presenters will be present for a defined period of time, allowing participants to view and ask questions of presenters.
Learn more about education session formats.
How are education sessions selected?
Review criteria: All submissions are reviewed and evaluated by the NASC Program Review Committee comprised of experts in snow and ice control and winter maintenance planning.
Your success in the selection process depends on how well your proposal supports these primary criteria:
- Practical application: Provides information that participants in their day-to-day work settings can use, offers lessons-learned and how-to-do-it strategies, and offers solutions for sustainability and resiliency of public works operations.
- Leading-edge: Addresses emerging trends and technologies, innovative concepts and approaches, and solutions to improve the provision of public works services.
- Relevance and clarity: Content is interesting and useful to a significant number of expected attendees. Participant takeaways are clearly stated using active verbs that indicate how they will benefit from the information presented.
- Participant takeaways: All proposals must include three (3) takeaways that indicate how the attendee will benefit from the presentation. The participant takeaways must be worded in response to the phrase: “At the conclusion of this session, participants will be better able to________.”
Get tips on writing a compelling session description.
Important: Proposal descriptions should be limited to 1,500 characters or less.
View instructions on how to write appropriate participant takeaways.
Important: Learning objectives should be limited to 300 characters or less.
What are the rules?
No sales pitches! Direct promotion of a speaker’s/company’s products, services, or monetary self-interest is not appropriate for education sessions. The public works audience appreciates learning about technologies, services, concepts, and new approaches; but is sensitive to the sales promotion approach. In your proposal, we recommend that you describe how the public works/end-user perspective will be featured in your presentation. Vendors are encouraged to have a public works client present with them, sharing their experiences and lessons learned.
Speaker registration and travel expenses: APWA does not pay speakers of concurrent technical and professional education sessions. Speakers are responsible for making arrangements and paying for travel and other expenses associated with attending the conference. Speakers may qualify for a complimentary single-day registration. Speakers attending the full conference are expected to register and pay the appropriate member or nonmember NASC registration fee.
Poster presentation details: Multiple poster templates will be provided to those selected for poster presentations. The poster must conform to one of the provided templates. APWA will edit all poster content for clarity, grammar, and spelling and print all posters for presenters.
When will I know?
Submitters will be notified via email of the accept/decline status of their proposal by mid-December 2024.
How do I apply?
Please read the following before clicking the button.
Important FYI: All correspondence sent to you about your submission(s) will be to the email address you listed in the form. If you have a highly restrictive work email account, please consider using a personal email address. You will receive notification of submission via email.