"I just completed another great and informative Chapter’s Presidents Council (CPC) in Washington D.C. CPC is the gathering of all Chapter President and President-elects along with the Board of Trustees from all 50 states to discuss the current state of Landscape Architecture. This happens twice a year; one Mid-year and the other at the National Convention. At the mid-year conference, all local chapters meet with the House and Senate staff members to promote and advocate for current Bills that will have an impact for Landscape Architects. Although this year was not as encouraging as year’s past due to all of the budget issues at the federal level, it is still a great event to educate and promote to the staff members the capabilities of Landscape Architects.
Our first meeting was a “Senate Coffee” with Senator Clare McCaskill and she informed us this is a very tough time with the budget issues and no parties, from the left or the right, are compromising to come to a resolution. After the Senate Coffee, Hunter Beckham (Trustee) Susan Maag (President-elect), Josi Nielson (Executive Director), and myself met with one of Senator McCaskil’s staff member to ask for support on Complete Streets, Transportation Enhancements (TE), Safe Routes to School (SRTS) Bills that are attempting to get on the floor to implement. If you are interested, the summaries of each of these Bills can be found here. We also lobbied for these same issues with Senator Roy Blunt and our individual House of Representative members.
National ASLA has been setting up Advocacy Day for the last decade and we have made a difference with the advancement of past bills which is great. One thing we were told at CPC was ALL Landscape Architects need to Advocate as much as possible for the advancement for Landscape Architecture. We are a medium size chapter in comparison which means we need to work harder than the other chapters. We are going to try to set-up some local Advocacy Days so stay tuned.
As your Chapter President, I want to let you know that the Executive Committee is here to help out and represent the St. Louis Chapter. Please let us know if there is anything that can be done or if you would like to see a change. If we cannot help you, then addressing the issue with National ASLA and see if they have a solution is the next steps which is what they are there for."
Chris Moon, ASLA
St Louis ASLA President