I am strongly in favor of keeping the professional license for Landscape Architects in Virginia.    Landscape architecture is about so much more than plants and Virginia has not historically enjoyed the social, environmental, and economic benefits of allowing our landscape architects to lead development in the same ways they do in other states.  Through education and licensure, landscape architects are qualified to run multi-disciplinary site design teams in the same way that an architect leads the building design team.  In other states, this is more often the case:  much like an architect must understand and integrate with the engineering discipline’s working within the building footprint, landscape architects are educated to understand and integrate the work of civil, structural, geotechnical, transportation and environmental engineers while also creating an aesthetic sense of place.  If we take away their license in Virginia, they will not be able to lead.  This is particularly important given the fierce economic development competition we face with other states; we need to be best positioned to entice businesses and professionals to chose Virginia by assigning a high value to both the design and function of our community development projects.

In Virginia, largely because of a lack of professional licensure before 2010, landscape architects were not typically able to lead site design teams; this has been slowly changing over the last 10 years.  Many localities still require a civil engineering seal on plans that can be covered by the LA license, which has further limited an LA’s ability to take on the professional responsibilities that the DPOR committee is now siting against them as a reason to discontinue the license program.  These hold over requirements will continue to change in time; to maintain equal footing between professionals, the license program needs to be continued.