CA Senate Bill 275 Would Convert Traffic Engineering (T.E.) Title to Practice

Senator Mimi Walters has introduced California Senate Bill (SB) 275, presenting a chance to convert the PE registration in traffic engineering into a full-fledged license. The bill would convert the 9 title-protected branches (agricultural, chemical, control systems, fire protection, industrial, metallurgical, nuclear, petroleum, and traffic engineering) into practice licenses. The bill would also allow overlap between all branches within every PE’s area of competency, as long as the practice is in connection with and incidental to the P.E.’s branch of licensure.

Under California current law, only civil, electrical, and mechanical engineers are allowed to practice, and only civil engineers are allowed to overlap their practice into electrical or mechanical engineering.

This bill would effectively create a licensing method similar to every other state in the USA, where boundaries between branches are blurred. Most states have a generic PE license that shows no branch of engineering on the PE stamp. Under SB 275, California would follow a more restricted model that closely resembles Nevada’s, where PE’s can collect licensure in one or several branches, with overlap recognized between branches.

The passage of the bill would allow California traffic engineers to qualify for the Professional Traffic Operations Engineer certificate, for which they are currently ineligible. It would also help to reinvigorate Oregon’s traffic engineering license, which is languishing as the sole T.E. practice license in the country.

The co-sponsors of the bill are the California Farm Bureau Federation and the Chemical Industry Council of California. They are interested in the licensure of agricultural engineers and chemical engineers, respectively.

The opposition is likely to come from the Professional Engineers of California Government (PECG), and the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) California, formerly known as CELSOC. They object to their perceived dilution of powers in the civil engineering license.

A bill supporter is the Registered Traffic Engineers of America (RTEA), which has been using its membership dues for a lobbyist to gather support for SB 275. RTEA has been discouraging traffic engineers who support this bill from contacting legislators and Caltrans workers from complaining to PECG, because RTEA feels such contact does not help the bill’s progress. Instead, RTEA’s strategy has been to ask traffic engineers to find users of engineering services, such as major corporations and trade associations, to support the bill.


References:
http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/09-10/bill/sen/sb_0251-0300/sb_275_bill_20090224_introduced.html
http://leginfo.ca.gov
http://www.techpubs.net/clcpe.html