Leaping into Another Legislative Session

On this Leap Day, ACECL is prepared to hit the group running as the 2024 Regular Legislative Session is set to kickoff Monday, March 11. In addition to legislation ACECL is planning to bring this year, we also anticipate having to fight some legislation that would negatively impact both the profession and business of engineering. 

This session we are planning to introduce legislation that will seek to strengthen the Hammett Act, the state's Qualifications Based Selection (QBS) law. In 2006, Louisiana passed its mini-Brooks Act (the federal QBS law). However, as we have seen an increased use of non-negotiated lump sum contracts, we have realized that the state's QBS law does not require post selection negotiations which is emphasized as a required component of the federal QBS procurement process. Our planned legislation will align our state and federal QBS law by adding language to the state law that will require the public agency to negotiate price after the consultant is selected. We are also planning legislation that will require DBE hiring and set aside programs established by any state or local public entity to have hiring goals that are supported by disparity/availability study data. 

Every session we have to oppose legislation that would negatively impact the business of engineering. We anticipate the architects will file legislation that will again attempt to repeal or grandfather the civil engineer exemption related to practice of architecture. Over the last six months task force members representing both engineers and architects have been working together to reach a compromise on this issue. However, the task force ended its last meeting earlier this month with the two professions being far apart on what a limitation to the civil exemption should look like. Please be on the lookout for legislative updates and calls to action pertaining to this topic. Protecting engineering and surveyor licensure is another issue that we seemly fight against every year, and legislation has already been filed that would establish universal reciprocity for all state professional and occupational licensing boards. SB 60 , by Senator Thomas Pressly, is almost identical to legislation filled two years ago that we were able to have the engineers and surveyors exempted from. We will attempt to do the same this year. 

The ACECL Legislative Committee will be meeting at 2pm Thursday, March 7 to review our sponsored legislation, along with other pre-filed bills we will recommend to support, oppose or monitor. If you are not already a member of the Legislative Committee but would like to be, email me directly at bdirmann@acecl.org.