Dear Board Members:

The importance of professional landscape architects in meeting the task of protecting the public in both natural and built environments should not be underestimated, as evidenced by its well-earned and longstanding relationships with other regulated design professions.

Landscape architecture offers a uniquely synthetic, additive approach to studying, understanding, and adapting to our changing world, its dynamic climate, sensitive environments, and diverse communities. Landscape architects are engaged by more than simply seeing a project built, but by anticipating and ensuring a sound, professional approach to the sustainable development of safe, equitable places for both present and future generations.

The profession of landscape architecture demands a unique breadth and depth of training and preparation across many fields of study and practice, from the static to the dynamic, from the empirical to the aesthetic. This training demands an equally rigorous process of exam-based licensing, a crucial measure and sign of professional competence and responsibility for maintaining the public trust, its health, equity, safety, welfare, and value.

Abolishing licensure not only eliminates this measure of professional competency, it threatens catastrophic economic impact to its practitioners as project leaders, from principals of diverse, interdisciplinary firms to smaller, niche teams and independent consultants.

Abolishing licensure degrades and dilutes a legally accountable and ethically grounded basis of practice by arbitrarily decimating the defensible scope of the profession, eliminating an expert resource for comprehensive site planning, environmental management, and cultural and ecological sustainability.

Abolishing licensure destroys an important allied design profession while shifting a wide range of comprehensive, technical mastery and ethical responsibility to other professions that may not be minimally competent (or professionally concerned) to maintain the public health, safety, and welfare beyond the conventional range of their core disciplines.

The built environment will be impoverished as a result, and will in turn transfer increased risk (and therefore increased life-cycle cost) for built projects from landscape architects to owners both public and private, to other disciplines, and ultimately to the communities they serve.

Please consider the positive impact that landscape architects have had in your own communities, and in creating places of value and worth in your own lives.

Please support the continued regulation of landscape architecture as a licensed profession in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Thank you,