Bottleneckers. William Mellor
Virginia’s 1990 titling law, for example, came about after an eight-year campaign.51 A coalition had formed in Virginia in the early 1980s to begin lobbying for a bill sponsoring certification of interior designers.52 It hired attorney and lobbyist Mark Rubin, who had recently succeeded in achieving licensure for landscape architects.53 The interior design coalition worked with Rubin to draft legislation, identify bill sponsors, and monitor the timing of bills.54
Simultaneously, the coalition organized a grassroots lobbying effort. Lacking substantial funds to donate to legislators’ campaigns, it instead relied on its wide support base of interior designers to engage in grassroots lobbying, which Rubin had trained it to do.55 After the national ASID organization began its campaign in 1985, the Virginia coalition benefitted from its substantive legislative materials and resources for lawmakers. One coalition member recalled that the new resources enabled the group to go to their first legislative hearing “loaded for bear.”56
Nonetheless, Rubin paid close attention to legislators’ support and had to pull the bill from consideration in 1986 and again in 1988, when it lacked the requisite number of votes to pass.57 The bill was brought back in 1990, at which point the coalition took advantage of three nursing home fires that had happened in Virginia that year to generate support for the legislation, with one coalition leader saying, “Nobody wants a disaster, [but] if it happens, grab-a-hold of it.”58
In addition to exploiting nursing home fires for their benefit, state and national members of ASID poured resources into the 1990 licensing push. Financial aid from the national organization paid for Rubin’s lobbying, representatives from ASID provided guidance and training to the state coalition, and the national office monitored all the bills in the legislature to alert the committee of other proposed legislation that might threaten the Virginia licensing act.59 After almost a decade of relentless petitioning, the designers received their titling law in 1990.
One of the primary reasons it took so long for design coalitions like those in Virginia, Washington, DC, and other places to win the law was that the need for regulation was far from self-evident. Although proponents of regulation euphemistically cite the requirement of having to “educate” legislators about the law’s importance as a reason for the repeated attempts to pass it,60 the intensive lobbying, political campaign contributions, and politicking tell a different story. In fact, when the costs and benefits of interior design regulation have undergone genuine scrutiny, results indicate that it carries significant costs for consumers with benefits accruing for only one group—licensed interior designers.
A 2009 analysis at the University of Minnesota examined insurance premiums and fire death rates as indications of the need for regulation of the interior design industry on public health and safety grounds. The researchers found no evidence that licensing would provide any measurable benefit in these respects.61 They did, however, find that interior designers’ wages were consistently greater in states with more restrictive regulation of the occupation. For consumers, this translates to greater costs, as the regulation enables practitioners to charge more for their services—as reflected in higher wages—in the face of less competition.
A separate analysis completed in the same year by two economists at Kenyon College found similar results.62 Drawing upon national census data, the authors found that in states where the interior design profession is regulated, consumers pay higher prices for design services; fewer entrepreneurs are able to enter the market; and blacks, Hispanics, and those wishing to switch careers later in life are disproportionately excluded from the field.
These two studies are only the latest in a series of examinations of the interior design occupation. An earlier study done in 2008 compared the complaint data for interior designers in states with stringent regulation of interior design to the data for states with lighter or no regulation.63 Complaint data here acted as a measure of the quality of service, with regulation proponents frequently asserting that licensing would result in higher quality among regulated practitioners. Results from the study found that states with no or less-stringent licensing regulations did not have more complaints than those with stricter regulations.
State agencies, too, have examined the need for interior design licensing and consistently found it lacking. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as ASID fomented its wave of title and practice acts, several states completed “sunrise” reviews—legislatively mandated processes designed to ensure that proposed regulations are really necessary for the protection of the public interest. It is common for state agencies to complete the reviews and present the results to the legislature in sunrise reports. The reviewers typically look for threats to the public from the unregulated practice of an occupation, weigh the costs of regulations, invite input from interested parties, explore regulatory alternatives, analyze the findings, and make recommendations—the first and foremost of which is on whether regulation is even necessary and, if so, what shape it should take. A related document is the “sunset” review, which examines an existing license or regulation to determine if its continuation is necessary. The review processes are often similar, with the primary difference being their timing.
These reports can be—or at least should be—particularly helpful to part-time legislators elected to office from widely divergent backgrounds. Few of them are likely to arrive at their legislative posts with expertise or experience in general occupational regulation or with detailed knowledge of particular occupations. Term limits also mean that legislators who do develop such expertise do not remain in the legislature longer than a few terms, after which they are typically replaced by novice lawmakers. These dynamics, joined by the near-constant campaigning required of many state legislators, whose terms span only two years per election cycle, and the intensely local nature of state politics, also make legislators comparatively more vulnerable to interest groups like ASID and other professional associations. They also increase the role of state agencies and legislative staff in informing regulatory decisions, such as through sunrise or sunset reports.
In the case of interior design, five states—Colorado, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington—have produced sunrise reports.64 Without exception, none of these reports found sufficient and reliable evidence to suggest that harm occurs as a result of unregulated interior designers. Moreover, when given the chance to provide such evidence for the reports, interior design associations either could not produce any65 or else could only produce complaints pertaining to the practice of unlicensed interior design in which no actual harm was alleged.66 The reports further found that means were already in place to ensure the quality of interior designers’ work and failed to identify any economic benefit to the public from such regulations. All of the reports ultimately recommended against titling laws in their respective states. Added to these sunrise reports were sunset reviews in three states—California, Maryland, and Texas—that came to the same conclusions, recommending the elimination of existing interior design regulations.67
And, on a few occasions, even governors have seen through the bottleneckers’ public health and safety rhetoric, vetoing bills to regulate the occupation. In Ohio, for example, former governor George Voinovich vetoed enabling legislation in 1992, saying:
After carefully reviewing Senate Bill 75, it does not appear to me that it addresses a significant health and safety issue. . . . Rather, it would appear that the registration requirements . . . follow the traditional model of professional licensing standards which often have anti-competitive affects [sic] and ultimately, lead to increased cost to consumers. . . . Senate Bill 75 furthers an already bad precedent of continuing to expand the well over 400 separate Boards and Commissions in Ohio.68
Six years later, when ASID tried again to pass the bill, the governor’s administration signaled its continued opposition. “Our primary concern is that this is needless regulation, and that supporters have not demonstrated adequate health and safety concerns exist,” said Bill Teets, then public affairs officer for the Department of Commerce.69
And, in Indiana in 2007, then governor Mitch Daniels vetoed a bill that was multiple years in the making by the Indiana Interior Design Legislative Task Force, led by the state ASID chapter. After several bills had died in committee over the years,70