The law of unintended consequences

Bruce Goff, Legislative Director IDCC

As the Legislative Director for the Interior Design Coalition of California I receive hundreds of questions from Designers across California. Somewhere out there my name is listed in the ‘gee he will know about this’ yellow pages. From those questions the coalition works to understand the day-to-day issues of the profession. More than ever the answers we find bring us back to the need to have a scope of work attached to a practice law to insure that we can perform the services we are educated to do.

Do you do project oversight, project management and planning for your clients as part of the scope of work you perform on a day to day basis? If so you just bumped in to a significant change of contractors law. Senate Bill 355 was entered requested of the Contractors Board is a redefinition of who is acting as a ‘contractor’.

For those of us who do not maintain any type of contractor’s licensure there have been simple methods to stay out of trouble:

Always have three bids for any labor
Don’t ever have the client pay you for
Always have the contract for labor between your client and the provider
Act as the client advocate in a professional capacity

Well no longer can we be assured that in a dispute we will be judged as not performing as a contractor. This new language generally makes you illegally acting as a contractor if you ‘schedule or coordinate’ any licensed trade. Coordinate? You mean get them to the job site or make sure that each one arrives in the correct sequence? YES you would now be breaking the law. In the bill is what the Author says as the reason for this.

"That due to ambiguities in the Contractors Law, consultants acting as ‘ construction managers’ have extend the scope of their jobs in to areas which have traditionally been under the scope of duty of a licensed general contractor. As a result, many inexperienced consultants now direct projects, schedule subcontractors and make recommendations on subcontractors…”

The law would be clear; if you do this you would be breaking the law unless you have a general contractors license.

What now? We will be working with the Senators office and in the legislature to influence the bill. The best way to not have this happen is to insure that in the scope and definition of the law for Registered Interior Designer (RID) there is language that shows what we do. Only with this can we be sure that a RID would not be accused of breaking the contractors law.

If you provide these services I urge you to contact your lawyer to see what they suggest you do to keep you out of the courts. We will keep the Interior Designers of California up to date on our progress.

The contractors board was not intending to impact the Interior Designs of California, however, as the scope of Interior Design is not called under a practice law, we will forever be the victim of ‘unintended consequences”. The good news is that we can prove we are trained and experienced and that we would not be that group of ‘inexperienced construction managers’. Now is the time.