Arizona state legislators want to deregulate a number of professions, among them landscape architecture. Credit: Visitor7 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
From the April 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.
Doug Ducey is a former CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, the ice cream franchise, and as such, can?t be expected to know a lot about landscape architecture. Which would be of no consequence were he not now the governor of Arizona and hot to deregulate a number of professions, including, at least initially, landscape architecture. His surrogate in the Arizona House of Representatives, Rep. Warren Petersen, like Ducey, a Republican, introduced a bill this winter that would end the state?s professional licensing requirements for landscape architects as well as for geologists, assayers, yoga instructors, cremationists, citrus fruit packers, and driving instructors. Ducey seems to see these licenses as barriers to work, a ?maze of bureaucracy for small-business people looking to earn an honest living,? as he said in his State of the State address this year. Landscape architects in Arizona, as you might expect, were struck by something close to panic and rose in opposition to the proposal, which passed in the state?s House Commerce Committee on a party-line split in mid-February. Legislators received 1,500 letters from landscape architects arguing against the bill, and 150 landscape architects showed up at the committee hearing. The pushback worked; lands...