After six years of legal fights, we finally have a federal court ruling in Chuck’s dispute with Minnesota’s engineering licensing board. Chuck and Strong Towns executive director John Reuter go back to the complaint that started the case, why Chuck’s temporarily lapsed license became the opening for the board’s action, and how a dispute over his public advocacy turned into years of hearings and litigation. Chuck also reflects on reaching the end of a fight that has followed him for years and what the decision could mean for other engineers who have held back from speaking publicly about their profession.
Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. I wrote back in 2015, ‘Can an engineer speak out for reform and still be an engineer?’ The answer at that time was unclear. What prompted that discussion was a complaint made against me not for any work that I had done as a professional engineer, not for any plans that I signed or specifications that I wrote, but simply for an article that I had created. A complaint was made against me with the state licensing board.
They investigated. They let me know that they found no cause to move forward at that point, but that they would be monitoring me to see if I violated or crossed any red lines in the future. Another complaint was made against me. This one involves something that they could sink their teeth into a little bit more. My engineering license had lapsed.
Mind you, I wasn't doing any work as an engineer, but my license had lapsed. I continued to reference myself in my advocacy and speech as a professional engineer. This has now made its way through a long, long legal process. We've been documenting it over the years. I want to tell you today right at the top that we just received a ruling from a federal court judge after years of litigation.
I think it's been three years at the federal court level. The federal judge has finally ruled that the state acted unconstitutionally in fining me, censuring me, sanctioning me, and that any attempt to do so in the future would also be unconstitutional. In a sense, we won. After many years of litigation, we have ended this victoriously. I wanted John Reuter, our executive director, to come on here because you could listen to me chat about this for an hour.
I'm obviously the focal point of the litigation because this dispute is about me, but this dispute has really been about the Strong Towns movement and led by the Strong Towns board against the licensing board of the state of Minnesota. John, you've been on the board the entire time except for these last couple of months, when you've been our executive director. I feel like you're the right person to chat about this. How are you feeling? Maybe I'll let you take over the podcast from this point on.
I am elated. This has been a long slog, six years, of what was basically an attempt to suppress your speech and to suppress Strong Towns' message out into the world. Not just to do that, but also to send a signal to other engineers that if they spoke out, that they'd better watch out, that people would come for them too. It's really important when we note that first complaint. It wasn't just, ‘Hey, I'm really worried about this guy because he's practicing engineering.’ You weren't practicing engineering.
It was a troll from another state who was actively looking and researching you to do opposition research on you to try to find something and filed a complaint. The complaint, if you look at the text, was all about your speech. Then it was, ‘Oh, and by the way, he's saying all these things while his license has lapsed, so you should go find him and get him.’ That's the basics of the origins of this case. It isn't incidental. The purpose was people were angry, engineers were angry that you were pointing out the flaws in the profession and pointing out bad decisions that were being made that were making people less safe, that were costing people more money, and were really both costing lives and driving bankruptcy of our communities.
Maybe it's important to explain engineering licensure. This is one of the things people have asked me about because I've heard people say, ‘Well, they took away Chuck's license.’ No, they didn't. I've heard people say, ‘Do engineers even need licenses? What is this?’ If you are an engineer and you want to design a bridge, sign the specifications for a road improvement, or build a sewer or water system, the state actually defines it as something along the lines of doing calculations for engineering work. So it actually has to do with doing analytical calculations.
If you want to do those things, you need a license from the state. This is true in all 50 states. They all regulate engineers. To be a civil engineer and do this work, to do traffic engineering, for example, you have to have a civil engineering degree. You have to pass a test.
You have to do four years of work under the supervision of a licensed engineer. Then you take what's called the professional engineering exam, which is a brutal exam. I took it. It was really hard. I passed it on the first try and applied and got my license.
That's the process. Then every other year in Minnesota, at least, there's a renewal process. You have to do continuing ed. I've done that throughout this entire period of time. There are, I can't remember how many thousands, something like 10,000 or 16,000 total civil engineers that have ever been in Minnesota.
I don't know how many of those are active, but it's quite a few. This is not a small group of people. The board, the licensing board, regulates that group. They are responsible for regulating the licensure of that group. What that means, if you read the statute, if you read the rules, it means that the board has the ability to oversee and sanction people who are practicing engineers based on, in a sense, their practice of the profession.
It's pretty clear that they get to regulate acceptable practice. The thing they tend to do most is intervene when someone practices without a license. That does, John, it does happen. You do have people who will say, I can sign these plans, or I can design this thing for you, or I can do this work that otherwise a license engineer would need to do. I can do it for you without a license.
The state intervenes in that, and they're right to intervene in that. I think those are really important things.
Why is that? Why do we not want me to decide how to design a bridge, Chuck, and want someone like you to do it instead? What's the big deal? I've built some bridges out of straws and stuff. I don't see what's the problem.
Here's the funny thing. I'm not qualified to design a bridge. Even though I have a PE, even though I am a professional engineer, and even though I had multiple classes in college, structures, concrete structures, steel structures. I designed multiple bridges during college. This is part of what you get trained to do.
My four years after I graduated was not doing bridge work. It was doing municipal engineering. So roadways, subdivisions, drainage, traffic, sewer and water systems. So as an engineer, I'm actually only qualified to do the work that I have in a sense worked under someone else and learned how to do. So I'm not even qualified to design a bridge.
That would be a stretch for me. If someone came to me and I said, yes, I'm going to go back to practicing engineering, I would not take on a project like that because I'm just not qualified. There's a lot that goes into structurally designing the abutments, designing for stress, and figuring out the dead load and the live load. There are even harmonic issues. I don't know if you've ever seen the Tacoma Narrows Bridge video.
It's a famous video in the engineering profession where they built the suspension bridge, but the harmonics of the wind coming through the canyon actually made the bridge start to move and flex. Then it started to take on a life of its own and collapsed. These are all intricacies that if you do bridge design, not only do you have the undergraduate degree, you probably, if you're doing high-level bridge design, have a graduate degree and many years, maybe decades working underneath someone who does this so that you actually have the expertise to anticipate and understand all of the different factors that go into making that safe. The state should absolutely regulate that. That's what we want.
We want a state board who is going to be looking out to make sure that the people who are doing that work actually know what they're doing on behalf of the public. So the board has a clear purpose, but it wandered off track here.
Let's talk about it. When they first filed this complaint, you went before something I think that's called the complaint committee. They had a bunch of questions for you about things. I don't think any of them had to do with whether or not you were designing bridges or roadways or water systems, et cetera. What were those conversations like at the very beginning?
John, it's so disappointing. I'm a Minnesotan. I'm a proud Minnesotan. I've traveled all over the country now and I meet people who are like, I'm from Texas and Texas is the greatest state ever. I'm not that kind of a Minnesotan, but I do feel like there's a certain prudence that Minnesotans have that we value.
So, yeah, when I went to the complaint committee, I assumed the conversation would go something like this: ‘Hey, have you been designing anything that required a license, or have you signed any plans?’ ‘No.’ ‘Okay. Have a good day.’ That's what I assumed the conversation would be because that's actually what the board does. Instead, the conversation became, Hey, we saw you giving a talk for The American Conservative. We saw you on YouTube with Google talking about parking regulations and transportation. Hey, we read your column that you wrote.
What if people actually believe what you're saying when you wrote these things? What if people actually listen to you? Are you concerned at all that what you're saying might be picked up and shared with the public? The hearing was 100% about my speech. It had nothing to do with anything else.
It wasn't even a hearing. It was like those show trials where they ask you questions, but they don't actually expect an answer. They just are making a statement and then expressing their incredulity. That's what this was from three different people on this six-person committee. They just made statements about how incredulous they were that I dared to say these things.
This is a regulatory board vested by the state to oversee engineers. The only thing they cared about was the words that had come out of my mouth and the things that I had written.
Right. Not the things that you'd written as advice to someone on how to build something or something even, but essentially your political speech, your advocacy, your statements about how we could actually create a better world, what the policy should be like. It was so far divorced from any actual formal practicing of engineering.
It made me sad. That's why I started with the Minnesota thing. Maybe we can call it whimsy or nostalgia. There is this belief that I have that, as prudent people, and let's be clear, I'm also proud to be a civil engineer. I feel like the engineering profession is full of great people doing great work.
I've known many of them, and engineers are pretty prudent people. They're not people who throw bombs, flame-shoot, and troll people. There's a joke in the engineering profession: How do you know an engineer likes you? Because they look at your shoes when they talk to you instead of their own. This is a profession of people who are thoughtful, prudent, reserved.
Here I was in a show trial before people who did not care about what they were being tasked with doing. The power that the state had vested in them to uphold the profession, they were there to settle scores and to really silence people who would speak out the way that I have.
They did attempt to settle those scores. What did they propose at the end of this whole thing? What did they come to you with?
We went back and forth. At this point, I had to have attorneys involved because things were spinning out of control. They had offered, I can't remember exactly what they call it, but they give you an agreement that they want you to sign. It's basically: you sign this, or we're going to court. The agreement, I can't remember what the fine was.
It was about $500. But what they wanted me to do is to sign an agreement saying that I had misrepresented myself and my credentials to the public. I don't know if that final agreement said I had committed fraud, but ultimately they found that I committed fraud. One of the earlier things said I committed fraud. They also had a false timeline, a timeline that they knew was false.
They had a false timeline. That made it look like I had renewed my license after I had been notified that it was expired. The fact is, my license had temporarily expired. I discovered that. I renewed it.
Then later, I got the sanction from them or the notification from them.
Notably, they approved your license renewal without any incident. There was never a question that you had the full right to be a professional engineer, that you had met all the standards and requirements to be a professional engineer. The question was that it had lapsed at some point. During the lapse period, you had said things that they didn't like.
That's the core of the whole argument. They were upset about things you had said during the lapse of your license. They were upset about things I said before and after that too. What they did was use the lapse in my licensure to say that because my LinkedIn page said ‘professional engineer’ and the opening slide in my presentation said ‘Charles Marohn, PE,’ calling myself a PE was a misrepresentation to the public. That was me committing fraud.
That was me basically saying something I had no right to say because I was not currently licensed; I had a lapse in my licensure.
I thought one of the most telling things that we haven't talked about often over the years was what we did in those early days of this lawsuit, which has now gone on for six years. We looked at what they had done to other engineers with lapsed licenses, including other engineers with lapsed licenses who practiced engineering, put their stamp on plans, and continued to proceed. In some cases, they didn't know. In other cases, they, like you, had a lapse unintentionally and just had missed the paperwork on it. But what's fascinating is none of those penalties came to the same level of what they sought against you for your speech.
That, again, was really depressing to me. When you're going through this, it's easy to feel under persecution: Why are they picking on me? Why me? Am I spinning this in the worst way? Maybe I should be a little more open-minded.
Maybe they have a point. Let me try to understand it. Then, when we looked back at the other cases, there were people doing millions of dollars' worth of work. Some were actually committing fraud. They intentionally knew they weren't licensed and were out doing work.
They did not even get censured. They did not get the kind of sanction the board sought for me. It just reaffirmed the idea that this was never about the practice of engineering. It was never about keeping the people of Minnesota safe. It was never about them doing their job.
It was always about silencing me and making an example out of me so that other engineers who may entertain similar thoughts kept them to themselves.
What have you heard from your peers in the profession as this goes on? How have they been watching this case, other engineers who support reform and are thinking about these ideas? What's been the impact of these last six years?
We could go back even further than that. Because I remember, we used to run this column called Ask R. Moses. It was a Robert Moses stand-in column. Robert Moses for good.
It was a good Robert Moses. It could almost have been Ask Jane Jacobs with an engineering degree, but we called it Ask R. Moses.
I just want to point out that was the antithesis of what Moses suggested, but go on.
I think the idea was that this was a reformed Robert Moses from the grave. He had seen the light and was now speaking from the grave, but the whole vehicle was to allow people with licenses to write anonymously for us. So we don't take anonymous submissions. When you write for Strong Towns, your name is on it. But what we found was that there were a lot of professionals who wanted to express ideas, but were worried about the implications to their license.
They were worried about what happened to me happening to them. So we agreed to publish their names under the pseudonym R. Moses. Strong Towns would validate that these are licensed professional engineers writing this stuff. You could submit a question and R.
Moses would answer it. So we understood from day one that within the profession, there is a certain threat of sanction for people who speak out. That being said, when this was in front of the board, we had, I want to say, about 70 engineers, licensed professionals in Minnesota and around the country submit letters to the licensing board asking them, don't do this. What are you doing? Stop.
This is not good for us. This is not good for the profession. Since this has happened, I find it hard to go anywhere where a PE doesn't come up to me and say, Thank you for doing what you're doing. I hope ultimately you prevail here. This is really important.
I would love to be able to speak up. I feel like I can't. I'm worried about my livelihood. I'm worried about my family. I'm worried about my own license.
I hope that you prevail. Except for the board, I have gotten nothing but positive support, feedback, and deep gratitude from my fellow professional engineers and other people doing this work for carrying this fight forward. There are a lot of people who want to speak up. There are a lot of people who have important things to say, and not just, John, in a public forum. I think it's one thing to say, ‘Oh, people would like to write for Strong Towns.’ That's not really what people are scared of.
People are scared of making a recommendation that doesn't comport with the AASHTO guide or what some engineer thinks should happen. We've seen people who are held back when they're talking about a trail recommendation or, they show up at their own planning commission meeting and say, hey, I've got an opinion on this or an opinion on that. These are acts as private citizens outside of their profession. They worry that engineers who disagree with them or who don't like what they're saying will use the licensing process to attack them just because of their opinions.
What do we lose by not having those voices be present? How is this actually weakening our places?
There are two important things. The first one is that engineers know a lot of stuff. Engineers are really smart. The civil engineering profession, professional engineers are highly educated, deeply experienced. They're in the trenches.
They know what's going on. They know where the bodies are buried. They know stuff. When we're not able to bring them to a public policy discussion, when they're not able to be part of the conversation, you lose a whole bunch of knowledge that is vital to the reform efforts that we think cities need to do. Now, there are engineers that are part of that, but they tend to represent what I'm just going to call the old school of thinking, the non-reformed type of thinking.
So what happens is the reform voices, which are not a small percentage. There's a large percentage of engineers. I would even say we're approaching a majority of civil engineers who think there needs to be large amounts of reform in the profession, but their voices are suppressed. The ones you get are the ones saying the same thing over and over. They're the ones who, in a sense, speak the same things because they're the ones who feel confident that if I repeat this line over and over, I'm not going to get hauled up in front of somebody.
I'm not going to have my license attacked. I think we miss out on those reform voices. In general, professional engineers have a lot to offer society. If you are going to serve on a planning commission, run for city council, volunteer for a committee, be with a Strong Towns Local Conversation, or pursue whatever your passion or advocacy is, You should be able to do that and not worry that someone somewhere is going to hear what you said, report that to the board, and then have the board do an inquisition against you. We're really talking about adding a whole dimension of people to our public life who feel suppressed and excluded from it right now because of this licensing requirement.
Let's talk about that experience. I think it's important to talk about what we're overcoming here because we've been talking about the big philosophical things. We're talking about the targeting and that they knew that they were targeting and it was focused on you and it was about the speech. I just want to step back and just talk about what this was like personally for you too. Because throughout this thing, many times you'd call me and we would talk about this and you'd say, ‘Gosh, it's $500.
What does it really matter in the scheme of things?’ I'm not practicing engineering. I can still go out and do advocacy. You'd waver at moments here of thinking, maybe this isn't worth it anymore. I think you decided, yes, let's press on. I know you decided to press on because we did, because of all the things that we've named here about why this was so important, about why it was necessary that someone stand up and actually achieve this landmark verdict that protects engineers to be able to speak.
But can you talk about the strain of six years of attempted professional discipline and litigation? What was it like for you?
I'm getting emotional listening to you because you and the board were always so insistent. I did waver. I think regular listeners of the podcast know me. I don't mind squabbling over ideas. I love public policy debates.
I love discussion. I love to look at issues from multiple different ways. I enjoy that. If you said, Chuck, I'm going to put you on a podcast with someone you disagree with and have them chat about this. I would love it.
I really hate the personal attacks. It really deeply hurts. I don't like fighting with the board. It seemed like a distraction in my life. I would go home at the end of the day and be crabby.
I don't like being crabby around my wife and kids. I would get these 26-page things from the lawyer that were due tomorrow, and I'd be on a plane reading and providing edits, and I'm up till three in the morning trying to get back to them in time so they can incorporate this thought or that thought. There were moments of this that were deeply stressful. I know this is going to sound dumb and petty, particularly given the verdict that came out. But a big part of this, from really the beginning, as soon as the board made their decision, the state's posture was, Charles Marohn is a liar.
Charles Marohn is a fraud. We would go to court. The attorney general from the state of Minnesota, not the attorney general, but a deputy attorney general would stand up and say, court, Mr. Marohn over here is asking for your permission to be able to lie to the public as he has lied in the past about his credentials and his thing. He wants permission to deceive people.
We should not give him that. It bothered me so deeply because. That's not me. I'm not that person. I actually knew that wasn't true.
They knew that wasn't true. They acknowledged that it wasn't true later on as we went further into these hearings, too. They knew it was not the case.
They were actually going into court and lying about you. Let's be very explicit about this. Yes, they knew that it wasn't true. The evidence was clear it wasn't true. These were people willing to do anything to pursue a political agenda against not just you, but against anyone who would speak out, especially professional engineers who would speak out.
John, you and I work in an arena where people throw punches. I get that. I understand that. I'm not saying I have a glass chin. We can take punches, and I can dish them out too.
That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. I think the thing that was probably most painful over the years was just this constant refrain of Marohn is a liar, Marohn is a fraud, Marohn wants to deceive. When you're in this situation, John, you hire an attorney and the attorney gets to speak for you. I got to testify once to the complaint committee and that was the show trial hearing. Throughout all of this, I wasn't allowed to actually speak.
I never got to speak at a judge. I never got to speak at a hearing. I never got to write anything in my own words.
You were deposed.
Yeah, I was deposed.
The deposition was quite good for you overall in terms of the case. I think it was quite helpful in establishing a train of thought.
The deposition was a bit cathartic. I will agree.
It did make very clear that you had not lied or purposely misrepresented anyone, and that you agreed we should care about protecting the practice of engineering and the safety of people. Our attorney said that usually, when a deposition is over, his job is to figure out how to clean up the mess because everybody says something dumb during an eight-hour deposition. He said, ‘That was the greatest deposition ever. We came out of that stronger than going into it.’ That was awesome.
The deposition was cathartic for me because it was the only time in the entire thing I got to actually say something. Otherwise, let's be clear: part of our legal argument was not to argue whether I was correct or not. Our actual case was that, whether you think Marohn is a liar or not, there is a separation between the board, which can regulate engineering practice, and speech. So regardless of what his speech is, whether you find it to be a lie or true, he gets to say whatever he wants. Even though he has an engineering license.
It's none of your business, which makes a much stronger ruling. But it also bothered me because I wanted someone to get up there and say, ‘I'm not a liar. Argue against that point.’ I just had to sit there and take it. I'm a big boy. I'm not asking for sympathy from people, but I'm shaking a little bit now.
That was hard. That was really not fun.
No, I totally recognize how deeply difficult it was for you personally. I think throughout the whole process, what I kept thinking is, we're in a position where your job's not at stake. The organization isn't really at stake. We would be fine. We could have moved on.
You would be fine. But the reality was, throughout all of this, we kept thinking about what this would be like for somebody who really couldn't afford this, who would lose their career. Who would lose their life, who could become unable to pay their mortgage, who could be unable to keep their house if they lost their license or was censured in this way. This attempt to chill speech is pretty pernicious and pretty dangerous in terms of what it could do to someone who did not have your set of circumstances.
Let's be clear. Minnesota rules say that as a licensed professional, you cannot do anything that brings disrespect or calls into question the engineering profession. It's a very broad rule. If you read it, you can interpret it as I'm not allowed to say anything critical of the engineering profession. That's what the state rule says.
I put myself in the shoes of: What if Chuck Marohn was not the head of Strong Towns and had thousands of members supporting us. I didn't have to worry about how I was going to pay my personal bills tomorrow, but I'm an engineer with a wife and two kids, and I've spent years in this profession. That was what I planned to do for my career. I go to my mailbox and I open up and I get the same letter that I got that said, Hey, you said this thing. You are bringing disrespect on the engineering profession.
You're now under investigation. It was traumatic for me to get that letter. It was difficult for me. I don't have the added layers of: If this goes poorly, am I going to lose my job? Is my firm not going to want to give me that promotion or send me out on this thing?
Am I going to not be able to pay for my kid's college? Am I not going to be able to make our mortgage next month? I don't have any of that hanging over my head, but other engineers would. In those darker moments, I was always motivated by the idea that we don't want people to have to be self-sacrificing in order to speak up and just say the things they actually think. The way the law is set up now and the way the board has interpreted their own mandate is very chilling for people who are in the profession and in a sense married to the profession as a career.
They have to go along. It was very chilling.
It was very chilling. We have this court ruling now. Let's go through what the court actually determined before we wrap up. What are we actually walking away with in this victory and how does it protect engineers' ability to speak out?
Let's be clear what this doesn't do. This doesn't impact the board's ability at all to enforce engineering laws. This does not change their capacity to regulate people who are practicing without a license. People actually doing engineering work without a license are still subject to board oversight. People doing things outside their own areas of expertise, people doing bad engineering: the board still has complete oversight of all of this.
As it should. As it absolutely should. What it does is create a separation, a separation that I think is implied and very logical and I think the public will get, but it creates a separation between what engineers do as part of practicing engineering and what engineers do outside of that. Engineers are now allowed to speak, write, and communicate about issues of engineering without having that be subject to oversight by the licensure board. Engineers could always talk about football or basketball or whether they liked a movie or not.
But there was this question: Can you have an opinion on engineering standards? Can you have an opinion on whether the city should pursue this grant or not? Can you have an opinion on, name your public policy thing that intersected with the engineering profession? What this ruling says is that there is a line. The board is not allowed to regulate the things you say; they can only regulate your actual practice of engineering.
That is regardless of what you call yourself. So coming out of this ruling, with that clear distinction now between the practice of engineering and talking about engineering, communicating and advocating for better engineering, what do you hope will happen with the engineering profession? What do you hope it looks like after this ruling as it moves forward?
Again, I'll speak as a professional engineer. I'll speak as one of them. I think that all professional engineers have an obligation to speak their mind. That is going to mean that a lot of them disagree with the things that we're doing. I'm okay with that.
But I think all engineers have an obligation as a professional to evaluate their work, to question their own practice, to ask difficult things: How do we improve public safety? How do we save lives? How do we best spend public money? What are the outcomes we're looking at? I think all engineers in doing that have an obligation to participate in a dialogue and a discussion about how we make this country better.
How do we do our jobs better? How do we make things safer? How do we spend public dollars in the best way? How do we improve our profession? Now that obligation is clearer because it comes with a protection: your ideas and opinions cannot be sanctioned by the state.
I'm not saying you can't be looked down upon. If you've had a crazy opinion and someone doesn't like it, that doesn't take away debate. Debate is healthy, but what this takes away is state sanction over your licensure. You now do not have to fear that the state is going to come after you for things that you say, believe, and express about your profession. So I think having removed that obstacle, you have an obligation to stand up and say those things.
If the state does come after you, there's now a precedent. One of the things we saw in this ruling was the recognition that this has never happened before. This exact thing has not happened in federal court in any circuit in the country. We don't see a similar example of this particular scenario here. It's someone actually fighting back, someone bringing it to court and saying no.
Now that protection exists for the first time.
Yeah, that's right. For the lawyers out there and the deeply legal people, let me give the nuance on that. The case we argued was ‘as applied,’ which meant the circumstances we were debating applied just to me. It is not a precedent for ruling the laws in Minnesota unconstitutional. The reason we argued it that way is because, again, it was easier to win.
But we also recognized — and the state recognized too, which is why they fought it the way they did — that if the federal court decides this, it does create case law precedent. The judge did not rule that Chuck Marohn, as an individual case, can say whatever he wants. She ruled that a professional engineer can say these things. The board cannot regulate that because that's outside of the board's jurisdiction. That logic will apply to everyone who comes after us, even though our argument was an as applied argument.
It's a huge step forward and a huge step for others. Hopefully it will never need to be used because these boards will figure out to let engineers speak their mind and allow them to enjoy their constitutional right to free speech and their ability to argue for reform. We won't end up here again.
I'm not fully confident that's totally the case. Someone may test it again, but it certainly makes it much less likely.
I am, John, because I think what should happen now is that more engineers feel free to speak up, and that should become normalized behavior. I'm practicing abnormal behavior for the profession because the conversations we're having in public usually happen in cubicles, back offices, and break rooms among two or three people who whisper to each other that this is screwed up but don't actually stand up and say it. What we should see now is a normalization where people feel like they can talk and that becomes accepted practice. So everyone won't have to make confessions of a recovering engineer. It will be more like Statements of an Engineer.
We'll rename the book Normalized Statements of an Engineer: regular stuff you'll hear from your local engineer about how to make transportation for a strong town.
Professional dialogue among professionals?
That's actually what it should be. Let's be clear. I think most engineers become engineers because they want to solve problems. To be told that all the problems have been solved, here's the book that tells you how to do everything, follow this manual and you will be protected from liability, make a good living and go on doing stuff regardless of the consequences. No engineer goes to college thinking that's what they should do.
Engineers are about solving problems. What we want to do is free them up to be the best that they can be, to be able to have dialogue that solves problems.
Well, Chuck, I just want to say, for what it's worth in all of this, I am so proud to be associated with you always, but especially when we're winning, it's a lot more fun. It is more fun. This was six years of something that was totally unnecessary. It was such a waste of time. The board should have been focused on more pressing matters of actually dealing with the real issues in the profession and figuring out how to keep people safe.
It was a distraction for us, but I'm glad that something good for the profession came out of this ultimately. I think it ultimately rested on your willingness and your endurance to go through this and to help create a standard that's going to allow more people to speak out. So thank you so much for this, for the six years of fight. I'm just so pleased to have gotten to be there with you through it.
Well, I will likewise thank you because I remember coming to you all with this the first time, just sheepishly. I came to you and said, ‘I screwed up.’ I didn't renew my license when it was up for renewal. Here's why. My reasoning made sense. It was an honest oversight.
I moved. They didn't send me the thing. I'm not practicing. I remember just being ashamed. Immediately, you, Andrew, and Ian turned that around and said, no, not only don't be ashamed, this is not normal.
This is not the way things should be. Every time that it was hard for me, I literally turned to you. I turned to the other board members and got unwavering support, and, quite frankly, when we turned to our members and said, Hey, litigation is super expensive. What happened? People sent us money to support the litigation.
People sent us support to be there. So, yeah, I'm deeply grateful to you and the board. I'm deeply grateful to all of our members and all the people who helped us get to this point. Now, yeah, I feel a deep obligation for us to make the most of this. Let's speak louder.
Let's speak more forcefully. Let's speak more confidently. If you're an engineer out there listening, if you are someone who's been nervous about speaking up, let's go. This movement has cleared a path for you and the public arena needs you, your dialogue, your thoughts, your insights, and quite frankly, the prestige and credibility that comes with being a professional engineer. Put it another way, we need you to keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
That's right.
Talk to you next time. See you, everybody. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org.