Landscape Architecture Magazine

Arizona state legislators want to deregulate a number of professions, among them landscape architecture. Credit: Visitor7 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

From the April 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Doug Ducey is a former CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, the ice cream franchise, and as such, can’t be expected to know a lot about landscape architecture. Which would be of no consequence were he not now the governor of Arizona and hot to deregulate a number of professions, including, at least initially, landscape architecture. His surrogate in the Arizona House of Representatives, Rep. Warren Petersen, like Ducey, a Republican, introduced a bill this winter that would end the state’s professional licensing requirements for landscape architects as well as for geologists, assayers, yoga instructors, cremationists, citrus fruit packers, and driving instructors. Ducey seems to see these licenses as barriers to work, a “maze of bureaucracy for small-business people looking to earn an honest living,” as he said in his State of the State address this year.

Landscape architects in Arizona, as you might expect, were struck by something close to panic and rose in opposition to the proposal, which passed in the state’s House Commerce Committee on a party-line split in mid-February. Legislators received 1,500 letters from landscape architects arguing against the bill, and 150 landscape architects showed up at the committee hearing. The pushback worked; landscape architects were removed from the bill in early March. They made the case, of course, that landscape architects are licensed in order to prove they have the competency to protect the public’s health, safety, and welfare. According to the Arizona Capitol Times, one legislator, Rep. Jay Lawrence, a Republican, suggested those concerns be left to the horse sense of clients to figure out whether they are hiring someone “capable or a moron.”

Petersen wished to clarify that under the now-scuttled provision there would still be safeguards in the bill’s requirement that landscape architects hold either a “certificate” from a national registration body or a degree from an accredited school before they can claim the title. The Council of Landscape Architectural Registration Boards offers no such certificate, and holding a degree in landscape architecture has long been regarded as the beginning, not the end, of demonstrating the ability to practice landscape architecture.

For several years now, owing to a tenacious push by ASLA, licensure has been the requirement to practice landscape architecture in all 50 states; a licensure requirement is currently under consideration in the District of Columbia. Robert Shuler, a lobbyist for ASLA’s Arizona chapter, explained that the absence of licensure in Arizona would keep in-state landscape architects from practicing in other states, while allowing out-of-state practitioners of any qualification to practice landscape design in Arizona.

The essence of this fight can scarcely be news to most landscape architects. Licensure may look like protectionism to people unfamiliar with the finer points of landscape architecture, but it has become an article of faith in a profession that safeguards people from small hazards such as slips, trips, and falls in public space, and bigger dangers such as erosion, pollution, and flooding. These battles come up almost perennially; they will almost certainly continue as long as antiregulation politicians thrive in state governments. Landscape architects in Michigan, West Virginia, and North Carolina are all looking nervously at calls to deregulate the profession this year. As your colleagues in Arizona can tell you, it is time-consuming and expensive simply to defend what you have.

If things are quiet in your state at the moment, take the opportunity to acquaint yourself with your legislators and let them know directly who you are, what you do, and why, in vivid business terms, licensure is important. It will pay off when an ill-informed official like Doug Ducey makes a move to open landscape architecture to just anyone.