Licensing Board to the Engineering Profession: "Stay in Line"

Professional engineers fear the complaint process. The practice of engineering is all about reputation, with an emphasis on prudence, earnestness, and reliability. We all want the person who designs that bridge we drive across, or the individual we trust to manage a multi-million dollar utility project, to be serious, trustworthy, and respected. Any hint otherwise can be costly for the practicing engineer, and so the profession has a built-in tendency toward conformity.

The ongoing dispute we are having with the Minnesota licensing board is not about me. It’s not even about Strong Towns. What is at stake here is whether professional engineers are able to speak out for reform, to advocate for changes that will save people’s lives and improve public budgets, despite objections from within the profession. 

Engineers must be able to speak freely and openly without fear that their colleagues will retaliate against them, threatening their professional credibility and livelihood, through the complaint process. 

Members of licensing boards are supposed to uphold the integrity of their institutions. Instead, members of the licensing board in Minnesota have abused their power, overstepping their authority in order to slander a leading reform movement—attacking someone who was not even practicing engineering—by issuing a state order of censure and reprimand.

This is a warning to other professional engineers: Stay in line or you will face attack by colleagues who disagree with you. 

At Strong Towns, we’ve not been shy about our critiques of the engineering profession. We’ve questioned the way engineers deflect criticism by blaming drivers for traffic fatalities. We’ve pointed out how professional dogma unnecessarily clouds value decisions that should belong to elected officials. We’ve challenged infrastructure spending programs backed by engineering societies and questioned the perverse incentives in how engineers are compensated for their work.

And, I wrote a best-selling book—Confessions of a Recovering Engineer—uncovering engineering dogma for a non-technical audience, giving local leaders the language and tools to push back on a profession that has been given far too much power and authority. 

I’m not naïve; I knew that many of my colleagues in the engineering profession would not like my approach, but I also knew that many agreed with me but were afraid to speak up. I thought I was shielding myself from formal attack by not doing any engineering work. I’m licensed (officially, I’m retired), but I have not performed any work that required a license for more than a decade. And, since I didn’t do any work that the licensing board regulated, I believed myself immune from their complaint process. I thought I could speak up and pave a path for other licensed engineers to follow, free of serious repercussions. In that, I was naïve.

The two formal complaints made against me—one by Jeffrey Peltola (2015) and a second by David Dixon (2020)—are merely attempts to use the violation process to attack ideas these engineers disagree with. They asked an arm of the state to do what they themselves could not: discredit my reputation, my reform ideas, and the advocacy work of the organization I lead.

That kind of attack is to be expected. What isn’t expected, and should never be tolerated, is a state licensing board that uses their power and position of authority to join in with these attacks.

From the very beginning of my dialogue with the licensing board, I acknowledged that my license temporarily lapsed (even though I do not need a license for anything that I do). As it became clear that the violation committee was unwilling to resolve the matter without an order of some kind, I agreed to sign an order acknowledging my use of the terms “professional engineer” and “PE” during the time period when my license lapsed. I even agreed to pay a fine. I felt all of this was excessive (and it was difficult to get the Strong Towns Board of Directors to go along with it), but I wanted to get this resolved and move on. As a professional, I was working in good faith.

The licensing board was not working in good faith. We requested, as part of the agreement, that the committee’s findings of fact be corrected to reflect an accurate timeline (that I renewed my license of my own initiative, prior to being notified of the complaint) and that references to Minnesota Rules 1805.0200 (dishonesty, misrepresentation, fraud, etc.) be removed. The violation committee refused to make these simple, clarifying changes.

Why did the licensing board insist on an unsupported finding of dishonesty, misrepresentation, and fraud? Why did the board insist on adopting incomplete findings of fact, findings distorted in a way that make me look dishonest? How should we perceive a complaint process that focused solely on words I wrote and speeches I gave and not on any work I performed as an engineer? 

These actions can be interpreted in only one way: The Minnesota licensing board is using the power of the state to attack our organization, our advocacy, and our message. They have joined with engineers who disagree with Strong Towns to stifle not only our speech, but to send a message to others within the engineering profession: Remain silent or face attack by your colleagues.

I write about cities, do public speaking, and host a podcast. I don’t practice engineering, and performed no work regulated by the licensing board during my lapse in licensure. Yet, among other sanctions, the board has now censured me, the strongest statement of disgust the state agency can make. They do this to me, yet numerous engineers who have acted egregiously and undergone board scrutiny did not receive censure.

As Strong Towns Board Chair Andrew Burleson wrote this week: For the Minnesota state licensing board, apparently corruption, fraud, and deception can be forgiven, so long as you don’t speak critically of the profession.

Today, I stand outside the profession, but not outside the credentials. I have a civil engineering degree. I obtained an engineering license and maintained that license for decades. I practiced professional engineering for many years in communities across Minnesota. I’m now an engineer in retirement, in good standing and able to return to practice any time I choose. 

In other words, I’m not some uninformed outsider that can be easily dismissed. I’m a credentialed expert, standing up among my peers, calling for dramatic change. For that, a handful of my colleagues feel I must be discredited. It should alarm us all that a state agency has now bent over backwards to join their cause.

I do not accept the licensing board's actions. They are treating engineering credentials like a mere trademark they are empowered to defend, to the exclusive benefit of their cartel members, regardless of the negative impact to the public. Their actions bring shame to the concept of licensure as an important state function. They should all resign.

The licensing board has done damage to themselves and their institution, and their actions will have a chilling effect on calls for reform within the profession. What it won’t do is silence me, or slow the growth of the Strong Towns movement and the reforms we are advocating for. Those reforms are unstoppable. The only question left for licensed engineers is when to stand up and be on the right side of an important and historic wave of change.

Now feels like the right time.

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