FROM THE HILL
Landscape Industry Deemed Essential – NALP Advocating for Your Continued Operation During COVID-19
IT HAS BEEN A FRENETIC TIME FOR THE LANDSCAPE INDUSTRY advocating to assure federal, state and local officials that landscape services are indeed “essential” and must be performed under any order to “lockdown” or “shelter in place.” Beginning with California issuing the first executive order on March 18 followed a rapid succession over the course of the next two weeks in which every state in the United States, including D.C., issued some sort of order limiting businesses and/or social gatherings.
By Andrew Bray VP, Government Relations
This article was written on April 28, 2020
Complicating the issue further was the release of the Department of Homeland Security Memorandum on Identification of Essential Critical Infra- structure Workers During COVID-19 Response on March 19. While this ver- sion of the memo did not specifically enumerate “landscapers” it did include the landscape industry by inference because the landscape industry plays a critical role in providing “services that
are necessary to maintain the safety, sanitation and essential operation of residence and businesses.” The DHS memo is designed to be only “advisory,” but many states prompt- ly adopted the memo and crafted orders that either specifically included landscapers or did so by inference. NALP continued to beat the drum on behalf of the industry in all 50 states on the essential nature of the industry and also launched several grassroots campaigns and published a website to provide updates on the status of land- scape operations in each state along with rationale to defend the essential nature of the landscape industry based on each order issued by a state. BUT to reduce ambiguity or further confu- sion NALP was actively communicating
32 The Landscape Professional //May/June 2020
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