Three days ago, I received my license as a License as a Landscape Architect in the Commonwealth of Virginia, granted by comity from my original license in North Carolina, where I have been licensed for 6 years. I am writing in strong support of keeping the practice of Landscape Architecture as a fully-licensed profession in Virginia. I am a graduate of the University of Virginia and I currently work for a large multi-disciplinary firm with many active public and private projects across the Commonwealth.

I have lived and practiced in three different states in my professional career, and I have worked on projects in cities and communities across Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland. All three states have similar requirements for licensure because they all understand how landscape architects directly impact the health, safety, and welfare of the public.

It is essential Landscape Architects remain licensed in Virginia as they are in our neighboring states and in all 50 states. Licensure is essential to guarantee our expertise in the complex projects we design and build. With our license, we guarantee that our projects meet local, state, and federal codes, we coordinate effectively and competitively among dozens of other licensed professional specialists, and we ensure the standards of public health, welfare, safety, and accessibility are met and exceeded. Licensure is the most appropriate form of regulation to ensure that the public is adequately protected.

The proposal for questioning the basis of a license for landscape architect states that other unlicensed professionals may perform similar work to landscape architects. However, that is an inaccurate and shortsighted conclusion. A landscape designer cannot do the equivalent work of a landscape architect particularly on complex, large projects for developers, municipalities, state, or federal clients. An unlicensed landscape designer provides no guarantee to the client, public, or locality in which they are working that they are equipped to manage these complex projects, because they may or may not possess the qualifications, experience, education, and testing that a licensed landscape architect is guaranteed to possess. Landscape architects are called upon for complex services that require highly technical skills, making it difficult for prospective clients to evaluate the competency of professionals. Licensure as a measure of competence can assist consumers in identifying appropriate professionals for design services.

Besides the guarantees that licensure provides for public health, safety, and welfare, our profession is broad and complex and intersects with other licensed professionals on a daily basis. Stripping our profession of the strict standards of licensure minimizes the role that we can play on those teams. We are often leaders of our design teams explicitly because we can work among the other professions and bring unity, cohesion, code compliance, and professional oversight to the design in ways that other more narrow professions cannot. We are trained to lead and unify projects involving architects, interior designers, civil engineers, surveyors, stormwater engineers, roadway engineers, lighting designers, developers, municipal planners, county boards of supervisors, community members, and more.

Without licensure, landscape architects will be unfairly disadvantaged in the marketplace. Oftentimes, federal, state, and local contracts require the work to be completed by licensed individuals. Licensure of landscape architects is necessary to keep the profession on an equal footing with its related licensed design professions, including architecture and engineering. This equality enables landscape architects to lead projects, form certain business partnerships, and serve as principals in multidisciplinary firms. Licensure for one profession, and certification, registration, or no regulation for the other, can cause confusion in the marketplace and may be perceived by the consumer as an endorsement of the skill and competence of one profession over the other. Where the professions overlap, it provides a state-sanctioned advantage for one profession over the other. This destroys the competitive, free market in which design professionals compete.

As the projects we as licensed landscape architects design and build have life spans of decades to even centuries (think of the historic towns, streets, and campuses in Virginia we all love so well), and as we are all servants of the public health, safety, and welfare for Virginia, I urge you to ensure the professional licensure of landscape architects will be protected for generations to come.

Thank you,
Julia Murphy, PLA
Timmons Group
1001 Boulders Pwy., Suite 300
Richmond, VA 23225