INSIDE THE NEWLY INDEPENDENT PELS BOARD

INSIDE THE NEWLY INDEPENDENT PELS BOARD

How it Will Benefit Engineers, Land Surveyors and all of Georgia

DAVID CARAVIELLO

In June of 2020, the Georgia General Assembly passed a law that created a new structural engineer’s license – a license that would be legally required for anyone stamping plans related to structural engineering beginning on January 1, 2021. With the clock ticking, the Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors Board (PELS Board) asked the administrative staff of the Professional Licensing Boards Division of the Secretary of State’s Office to post a PDF structural engineer license application to the PELS Board’s website that applicants could download, fill out by hand and then physically mail to the Board’s headquarters in Macon (the website didn’t allow for a form that could be filled out online). The Board had approved the application form at their August meeting, which is also when the Board made the request to have the form posted.

But nothing happened. The volunteer members of the PELS Board had already offered to process all of the incoming applications themselves; all they needed the staff to do was post the pdf to the website – but still, no PDF file was posted. At their October meeting, the Board took a formal vote to order the pdf to be posted. But since the staff assigned to the PELS Board also worked for seven other professional licensing boards operating under the Secretary of State Office’s “shared services” model, they were stretched so thin that there was no available manpower to process the simple request. Ultimately, the PDF application form didn’t appear on the PELS Board website until December 15th – just 16 days before the new law went into effect.

That was the moment when members of the PELS Board realized that something had to change. And on May 9, 2022, it did—when Gov. Brian Kemp signed House Bill 476 into law, which removed the PELS Board from under the Secretary of State’s office and made it its own separate agency. And on July 1, 2023, the newly independent PELS Board will finally become funded, receiving its first annual appropriation of over $1 million to obtain new software, create a modern, user friendly website, open its own office, and hire its own executive director and other staff who will work solely for Georgia’s engineers and land surveyors.

“It is pretty monumental that we are allowed to become a separate state agency with our own staff, with our own budget, with more control over how we do things,” said PELS Board member Bill Womack of Womack & Associates Consulting Engineers. “At the same time, we are going to be held accountable by the engineers and land surveyors, because they're paying renewal fees and application fees. If we don't do our job, that's going to be a problem. But our role is to protect to the public…and this move is going to greatly enhance our ability to do that work.”

Indeed, the changes go far beyond the ability to post a PDF to a website. While many engineers and surveyors were frustrated by the lack of customer service and inability to easily conduct transactions online under the old system, the PELS Board’s most important role is enforcing the rules and regulations that protect public safety. Under the new law, the PELS Board will be able to hire its own dedicated investigators who will be able to work with licensed engineers and surveyors who understand the technical and ethical aspects of a licensure complaint. This will allow those complaints to be quickly investigated and the wrongdoers appropriately disciplined – something that rarely happened under the previous model in which the PELS Board and dozens of other state licensure boards shared only a handful of investigators between them.

“For us, in our industry, one catastrophic issue or one life safety issue is too much,” said Darien Sykes, President of Sykes Consulting and Chairman of the PELS Board. “Whether it's undertaking an investigation or helping to create more opportunities to get more people into our industry by getting more people licensed, these are things with long-term impacts. So, I believe this will really have a huge impact on our profession.”

‘JUST SPREAD WAY TOO THIN’

The PELS Board was created by law in 1937, and its independence had been a goal of the Georgia engineering industry for decades. Led by former PELS Board Chair Doris Willmer, the PELS Board conducted a self-study in 2005 which concluded that the Board needed to follow the model used by almost every other state in the southeast and become independent.

According to a 2021 report by the Georgia Occupational Regulation Review Council (GORRC), the Professional Licensing Boards Division (PLBD) of the Secretary of State’s office oversees 48 different professions, with 191 licenses types and 499 different methods to attain them –managing 534,619 total individual licensees, with 46,751 of those licenses belonging to engineers and land surveyors.

The PLBD operates under a “shared services” model, in which the same spread-thin staff members staff multiple licensure boards. In the case of the PELS Board, four staff members were trying to manage six unrelated licensing boards with nearly 60,000 licensees. Weeks could pass before engineers learned whether they’d passed a PE exam. Applicants would apply to take an exam only to arrive at the test site to discover their application hadn’t been appropriately processed by the PLBD staff. Engineers and surveyors found it difficult to get information or get a call or email returned.

More importantly, because complaints about unauthorized, negligent, unethical, or incompetent practices were going unaddressed, engineers and surveyors began to see no reason to bother filing those complaints. The 2021 GORRC report noted “the rapid decline in complaints submitted to the PELS Board over the last four years.”

“Part of the impetus behind us moving to a standalone board is because the current staff, who are all great, hard-working people, are just spread way too thin and are not able to process everything and cover all of the calls and answer all the questions,” said Taylor Wright, Vice President at Atkins, and Vice Chair of the PELS Board. “So, to have our licensees be able to call up and talk to somebody who works only with engineers and surveyors and can answer their questions, or be able to pull up a website where they can do everything online… just that responsiveness, I think, is going to be the biggest change.”

Added Sykes: “Our current administrative staff, they serve several boards, and they’re spread thin. We believe they’re doing the best they can. But there are insufficient resources to respond to our engineers and surveyors.”The PELS Board is not the first licensure board to strike out independently. Attorneys, Accountants, Doctors, Dentists, Insurance Agents, Pesticide Applicators, and Pharmacists all have their licensure boards outside of the PLBD.

The movement toward an independent PELS Board found strong support in the General Assembly, according to Michael Sullivan, President & CEO of ACEC Georgia, which had been working with all of Georgia’s other engineering associations within the Georgia Engineering Alliance for many years to address the customer service complaints and enforcement issues plaguing the PELS Board. “The Legislature was very supportive,” Sullivan said. “They understood the problems, having heard similar complaints from their constituents in other licensed professions. And some of the legislators are also licensed professionals themselves, so they have firsthand familiarity with these issues, which are not unique to engineers and surveyors. So, the General Assembly was very supportive that this needed to be done.”

Sponsored by State Rep. Dale Washburn, the “Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors Act” (House Bill 476) forming the independent PELS Board passed the House on March 1, 2022, by a vote of 163 to 2. The Senate version passed unanimously on March 29, 2022, and 41 days later, Gov. Kemp signed the bill into law. The law does not change the makeup of the PELS Board, which is still appointed by the governor and must still be comprised of civil engineers, a structural engineer, an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, two land surveyors, and a “consumer member” who is unaffiliated with either profession. “All of that stays exactly the same,” Sullivan said. “What changes is the powers they have been given. They have the authority to hire an executive director who reports directly and solely to them. They can hire staff, purchase licensing software, create a new website, lease office space, and do all the things that need to be done. So, they are fully independent, and starting in July, they will finally have the funding to start acting on that.”

Eventually, the independent PELS Board hopes to have a larger staff, but “because their initial budget wasn’t quite as large as they would have liked, they won't be able to get fully staffed and do everything they would like to do in the first year,” Sullivan said. “They'll have to prioritize and make choices about putting first things first.”

AN INTENT ‘TO PROTECT THE PUBLIC’

Under the previous incarnation of the PELS Board, what should have been minor undertakings—changing a last name on a license due to a marriage, for instance—could become major headaches. The ability to pay license fees or conduct other transactions online was limited at best. “What we’re currently operating with has not really kept up with the times,” Sykes said. “So, we’re talking about much more robust software—responsiveness through the website, making it user-friendly. We think this will address a lot of the issues.” All reasons why the first priority of an independent, funded PELS Board as of July 1 will be to purchase new software and migrate all the information from the old system. Beyond that, the board will need to hire an executive director to help it set up the new agency. “There’s not a manual for that,” Sullivan said. The new executive director will oversee the hiring of staff members, with a budget that will allow for the hiring of about five employees in the first year, with hopes for more staff and additional appropriations in the next fiscal year.

“It will make a huge difference,” Wright said. “I mean, right now, we have an executive director who I think is responsible for seven boards. So just to have an executive director who would only be responsible for our board and what we focus on, having that responsiveness, advocating for changes that are important to Georgians and to our Georgia licensees—that would be huge. And having a dedicated staff to review and process applications, and do it in a timely manner, and be able to answer questions would also be very important.” Added Sullivan: “Engineers and land surveyors will be able to transact their licensure-related functions seamlessly, conveniently, and easily online. With a minimum of difficulty, they'll be able to pay for those transactions with a credit card online. If they have a problem or if they have a licensure-related question, they will be able to call a number where they can get answers from someone who works exclusively for the PELS Board, who understands engineering and land surveying licensing issues and can get them the information they need in a timely manner. They'll have their emails and calls responded to and answered, which will be a big improvement.”

The difference in terms of enforcement should be equally notable. One of the findings in the 2021 Georgia Occupational Regulation Review Council’s report on the proposed PELS Board changes was that the current “delays of enforcement for engineering and surveying violations are a threat to public health and safety.”

Going forward, “we will have investigators who have more training, if you will, in the nuances of engineering and land surveying,” Womack said. “They will be better equipped when they go out. They may still be a retired police officer, but we’ll be able to give them more training.” Sykes envisions using retired engineers and surveyors in enforcement roles as well. “Maybe there’s a retired engineer, maybe there’s law enforcement as well, maybe we have two investigators who work hand-in-hand,” he said. “But the idea is to have dedicated people who are knowledgeable.”

Previously, the PELS Board had to request a state investigator whenever it learned of a violation. “Those investigators were definitely not in the engineering and surveying industry,” Wright said. “They could be investigating something completely different one day and then be asked to investigate something highly technical the next. One of our biggest goals is to hire our own investigators, just like our peer boards in surrounding states, who are actively going after those who have been identified. Because, unfortunately, there are some bad actors in our state.” In the future, the PELS Board “will have investigators who understand the technical and ethical aspects of those complaints” said Sullivan, “and an attorney who can pursue those investigations to the point of taking appropriate legal action that will stop those bad actors from doing the bad things that they were doing.” The state of North Carolina—which has an almost identical state population and the number of professional engineers and land surveyors as Georgia, as well as an independent state licensure board—helped provide the PELS Board with a blueprint in the areas of budget and staffing. And while the PELS Board receives its first funding on July 1, the changes won’t occur overnight. There remain a number of decisions to be made before this new, independent edition of the PELS Board becomes fully realized.

“There's certainly an obligation as a board member to make sure that that we respond in a way that pays off on all of the hard work that’s been done by a lot of people,” Wright said. “Because this was a huge effort by a lot of people, and it does represent a huge opportunity to elevate the engineering and surveying industries in Georgia. So, I do feel pressure. And I think if we do this the right way, we can be more accessible; we can get more people involved, we can elevate the industry. We've got to make those decisions, and as a board, we have to drive that change. And we really owe it to our licensees that are paying increased fees, and those that have worked hard to get us to this point, to make sure that we do make the right decisions.”

FOCUS ON BOTH PRESENT AND FUTURE

An independent and now-funded PELS Board is poised to make a difference for engineers, land surveyors, and the general public through more streamlined licensing processes and more effective enforcement. But there’s also a grander vision at work, one that aims to help fill some of the thousands of engineering and surveying jobs that will be added in both the state and the country over the next decade, particularly with increases in infrastructure money investment.

“We are looking at being able to do more outreach,” Womack said. “By that, I mean going to technical societies, going to places where you can give a one-hour talk, that type of thing. But also being able to get out in front of students to get them excited about land surveying and engineering, all the way down to the middle school level. We have a declining number of engineers and a drastically declining number of land surveyors. So, we have to figure out how to stop that trend, and a lot of that is going to be outreach, getting out in front of people.”

Previously, Womack added, the lack of a budget made it difficult for the PELS Board to send its members—who are all volunteers and with the exception of the consumer representative, are all professionals in the industry—to technical societies or other such gatherings. Now, “we will have a better opportunity to be in front of everybody,” he added. “I'm a firm believer that the Board needs to be the face of engineering and land surveying and not some Wizard of Oz behind a magic screen somewhere in Macon. We need to be in front of the screen. People need to know that we are real honest-to-God engineers and land surveyors.”

Sykes shares that vision. “We are weighing and discussing with various organizations about how we can best serve them. And we are definitely considering being more present,” he said. “Our executive director, that person is going to champion the cause of being more active in the community, whether it's virtually or meeting with our industry leaders. But I think that the executive director, in tandem with our location, are going to be key elements to that outreach component.”

Sykes envisions PELS Board members and staffers speaking to high schools and colleges, even inviting students to PELS Board meetings and encouraging them to ask questions. “We want to be connected with the community,” he added. And in the process, take an active role in shaping Georgia’s engineering and land surveying future, far beyond issuing licenses and citing violations.

“For me, as an engineer, I believe that we're at a crossroads in terms of where our industry is going,” Sykes said. “There's more and more pressure about achieving deadlines, compressed schedules, tight budgets. And I've sat in rooms with engineers who are saying that they're losing people in our profession. I believe that what we're doing is one of the most important things that I've done as an engineer, because we're creating an opportunity that I hope will improve our industry and have a great impact.”