Landscape architects directly impact public health, safety, and welfare. Licensure is the most appropriate form of regulation to ensure that the public is adequately protected. ensuring that professionals are qualified by virtue of their education, experience, and examination. 

Licensure of landscape architects ensures that untrained individuals are prevented from engaging in professional practice that substantially (or significantly) impacts public health, safety and welfare.

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.  Eliminating licensure for landscape architects would allow unqualified companies without quality assurance or standards to compete for projects on equal footing with with professionals, placing the public at risk. 

The scope of landscape architectural practice includes site plans, plans of development, grading plans, vehicular roadways and pedestrian systems design, stormwater and erosion control plans, and the siting of buildings and structures, all work that localities and federal agencies require to be sealed by licensed professionals. Virginia landscape architects would be excluded from federal, state, and local work in Virginia that requires licensure.

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.

Please retain licensing requirements for Landscape Architects.