Giving NJ Landscapers the Right to Engage in Landscape Lighting
"The Fourteenth Amendment protects an individual’s right to practice a profession free from undue and unreasonable state interference. . ."
- Adam Summers, Reason Foundation
There is a serious issue facing Green Industry Professionals who wish to engage in the installation of Low Voltage Landscape Lighting. Current NJ law (NJAC 45:5A-18) restricts this profession to licensed electrical contractors.
This restriction places 12-volt work in the same category as 120-volt work – requiring the same apprenticeship, training, testing, licensing and ongoing education for both. This makes no sense since 12-volt installations are absolutely safe. There has never been a serious injury from contact with any conductor below 30 volts (compared to hundreds of deaths every year from 120 volts).
Landscape Lighting is an artistic profession best suited to those who design landscape features and who understand the esthetics and growing properties of plant materials. The work of landscape lighting involves a great deal of digging, pruning and placement of fixtures in the canopies of trees and shrubs. This is work that landscapers already do and that most electricians have no interest in doing.
Unless the law is amended, New Jersey’s Green Industry Professionals will be unfairly shut out from this fast-growing and rewarding work.
To address this issue, the NJGIC is leading a task force with representatives from the New Jersey Landscape Contractors Association, the New Jersey Nursery and Landscape Association, New Jersey lighting manufacturers, distributors and contractors.
For more information about this effort, contact Nancy Sadlon at econcerns@eclipse.net.
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