Landscape Architect licensure allows highly trained design professionals to practice their profession as a distinct endeavor.  Without licensure, an entire class of design professionals with a peculiar scope of expertise and general design skills common to other design professions will no longer be able to fairly practice and function in the marketplace.

It would be both arbitrary and capricious to remove the right for Landscape Architects to practice their profession while other trades governed by the APELSCIDLA board could continue. Road alignment, storm water management, community design, site planning, park planning, industrial solar and wind generation facility design are not just the purview of engineers, surveyors, and in a more narrow capacity, architects, but are the normative design activities in which Landscape Architects practice.  

Landscape Architects bring their particular expertise to bear on projects both public and private and through their work improve built environments with special attention to safety, public welfare, environmental conservation, aesthetic and artistic expression, historical preservation, and biological enhancement.  The particular training in soils, plants, biology, art and architecture, social studies, human factors, economics, urban planning, and history received by Landscape Architects in their FIVE year bachelor studies result in a distinct professional that brings valuable dimension to projects that, for example, the more narrowly mathematically based FOUR year bachelor programs in engineering do not provide.  

While I believe in a pure academic sense that private certifications and trade organizations could perform most functions of the APLSCIDLA board and the larger DPOR; however, we currently have this system of governance and regulation and to singularly remove the right of one profession to practice while not disbanding the regulation of engineers, architects, and surveyors would gross injustice to a minority profession.  Even the suggestion of deregulating engineers and architects, would make even some libertarians recoil, much less, the rule and law loving bureaucrats and insurance industry.   Should attorneys not have a Bar and Doctors not have a Board?  Would you go to a disbarred attorney for divorce advice or take your child to a doctor whose license was removed for malpractice? I believe few will truly argue against the need for some organization, authority, gild, or society to govern professions and provide a standard by which one may enter that profession or occupation and ensure the members adhere to a standard of conduct.  The question then arises, "what is best and most efficient way to do so and how do professions that have some overlap regulate relative to each other".  I suggest that the APLESCIDLA board is an effective and efficient way of regulating Landscape Architects and other allied professions. 

The principle forces driving the suggestion of deregulation of the Profession of Landscape Architects seem to stem from law makers and citizens that are fundamentally opposed to regulation and to the individual costs of hiring a professional when a locality, HOA, building department or other organization demands a design be produce by a licensed professional.  Yet, these individuals might acknowledge, when cornered, that there can be costs to society and to individuals if spaces and places are designed in ways that impair safety, cost more to maintain, cost more when they fail, and cost more to quality of life when they don't work well.  In my experience, relatively few among the public and even among some lawmakers know anything about the Profession of Landscape Architecture.  

Landscape Architecture is an old discipline whose roots are architecture, engineering, and landscape gardening (the planning of massive parks and fine elaborate gardens of the age of when kings, queens, and emperors ruled vast domains).  Sadly the word "landscape" causes some to associate it with something they saw on HGTV or the occupations that might plant a few shrubs in the front yard (landscaping).  Few know that the discipline of Landscape Architecture has laid out many of the great cities of the world, invented the designs for our modern traffic interchanges and clover leaves, shaped the suburban development patterns, designed the Shenandoah National parkway, conceived the grounds and gardens of estates like Versailles and Biltmore, shaped amusement parks and resorts which we frequent, designed the fountains and streets of cities like Dubai. Next time you stroll through the National Mall, ask yourself whether the person designing such should be proven to be educated, competent, and legally liable for errors and should they be held in the same esteem as other allied design professionals; if so, then you should support licensure of the Profession of Landscape Architecture. 

Andrew Cutright PLA